[HN Gopher] The Inter typeface family
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The Inter typeface family
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 298 points
Date : 2021-07-30 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rsms.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (rsms.me)
| alberth wrote:
| It's call a spade a spade, Inter is an open license replica of
| Apple's San Francisco font.
|
| The San Francisco font was first released Nov 2014 [0]
|
| Inter was first release in Aug 2017 [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(sans-
| serif_type...
|
| [1] https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/93554/inter-rasmus-
| andersso...
| crazygringo wrote:
| If we're calling a spade a spade, then _both_ San Francisco and
| Inter are replicas of Helvetica.
|
| They're both literally just Helvetica modernized a bit to
| remove personality (like the curled end to an "R" or "a", or
| the downstroke of the "G"), and with spacing appropriate for
| screens rather than print.
|
| Inter isn't any more derivative than San Francisco is --
| they're _both_ derivative.
| sbuk wrote:
| Which itself is a replica of Akzidenz Grotesk.
| viztor wrote:
| Do you care to elaborate? I understand it might look similar in
| style, wouldn't call it a replica though, a lot of the fonts
| are similar. For example, maybe a detailed pixel to pixel
| comparison why it might be a replica?
| mrunseen wrote:
| It is not a replica, they are similar in style (they're both
| neo-grotesk). Also the design of the letters can't be
| copyrighted in the US, only the files (.otf, .ttf etc.) can.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This looks nice but I've never seen ?! combined into a single
| glyph before and found it hard to recognize.
| david-gpu wrote:
| It seems to be called an "inverted interrobang" and I had never
| seen it before, either. I can't say I'm a fan; a symbol is only
| useful if other people understand it.
|
| Anyway, as long as it is not automatically replaced every time
| someone types ?!, it's all good.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Very clean. I clicked hoping to see a mono variant - I'm always
| on the lookout for good terminal fonts. Maybe one day!
| mrunseen wrote:
| Check "Basier Mono" from Atipo. Regular weight is free and the
| other weights are quite cheap.
| trs8080 wrote:
| what's your current favorite terminal font?
| rofrol wrote:
| Ubuntu Mono but you need to set font-size bigger than for
| other fonts.
|
| Ubuntu is an OpenType-based font family, designed to be a
| modern, humanist-style typeface[1] by London-based type
| foundry Dalton Maag, with funding by Canonical Ltd
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(typeface)
| ww520 wrote:
| Source Code Pro.
| spazx wrote:
| I love this so much. It's everything I want in a practical
| typeface. It's only missing a couple little things. Can we get an
| alternate 7 digit with the line through it, and 1 digit with the
| bottom horizontal line?
| pell wrote:
| It's open source, if you know how to make those modifications
| you can actually make it happen! I definitely like your idea
| with the seven.
| abzug wrote:
| All I want is Inter Mono _wink_
| muhammadusman wrote:
| that would be amazing! If it's anything like SF Pro - SF Mono,
| it would be great.
| abzug wrote:
| I don't like SF Mono.
| dheera wrote:
| Get Jetbrains Mono, it's awesome
| abzug wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I, and AFAIK rsms uses.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I use Cascadia with it (I know, poor license compatibility
| microsoft bad yadda yadda), and it goes together quite nice
| besides the inconsistent weighting.
| abzug wrote:
| Under what OS? I find Cascadia Code on macOS very thick,
| almost like a bold font.
| [deleted]
| whall6 wrote:
| Kind of gives me NYC Subway font vibes
| PedroBatista wrote:
| I use it in my low effort low maintenance personal site (
| http://pedrobatista.eu ) and love it!
|
| One thing I did notice it's the characters are bolder in Firefox
| than Chrome, don't know if it can be fixed at font level or it's
| a browser thing. But it's not a big deal.
| Lorin wrote:
| Been using it for ages - it's brilliant. It'll be front and
| center in in my upcoming major web library project site once
| launched :)
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It seems very full features with lots of options. My initial
| reaction was that they didn't do enough to distinguish between I
| and l which is a deal breaker for me. However, after looking
| around, they have options with disambiguation and curved tales on
| l to deal with that issue
| https://rsms.me/inter/lab/?antialias=default&feat-case=1&fea...
| account_created wrote:
| Indian Government blocks a webpage[1] from this site, for no
| reason.
|
| [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/glyphs/
| codedinosaur wrote:
| I can access the page just fine from India
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Indeed. Utterly ridiculous.
| oefrha wrote:
| What does that even mean? You can't block a single page on an
| HTTPS site unless you can decrypt the traffic.
| tadfisher wrote:
| You just reminded me of one of my favorite YouTube videos of
| all time. https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw
| kermire wrote:
| Seriously. I don't know how they're bypassing https.
| simonz05 wrote:
| Last week The Changelog talked to Rasmus Andersson about his
| journey as a software creator, Playbit, and his work on the Inter
| typeface. Worth a listen.
|
| https://changelog.com/podcast/449
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| fyi it's the font used by notion.so
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| when I looked at the "Inter" name I though it was about the
| football team
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_Milan
| helmholtz wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've switched all my plots to use Inter to label the
| axes and the legend, and it all just appears much more readable
| in PPTs to my eyes. Big fan of Inter.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Is there a reason the zero is not more distinguished from the
| capital letter O? Is it just a design choice, perhaps indicating
| the preferred uses for this font?
| jandrese wrote:
| There is an option for a slash through the O, you can see an
| example on the bottom of the page below the font toy widget.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Weird to see "aabc" though, since in Norway our alphabet goes
| "abc...xyzaeoa". It's like... they took the two very most distant
| letters in the alphabet and placed them next to each other :S
| _moof wrote:
| Very odd choice. If I had to guess I'd say they wanted to make
| that block of text rectangular, had to add one more letter to
| do so, and picked one at random without understanding what it
| is.
|
| EDIT: And now I learn that the designer is Swedish, so if
| anyone needs me I'll be eating my helping of crow for that last
| remark. :$ Sorry Rasmus!
| varjag wrote:
| He has no excuse for using O for zero then!
| muhammadusman wrote:
| When this got added to Google Docs, my usage of Google docs went
| up. The font is incredibly pleasant to look at and works at all
| sizes.
| ecf wrote:
| I never realized there were so many variable facets to font
| design until reading through this. Very well done
| petestaples wrote:
| We are also fans: For our everyday workhorse typeface, we
| exchanged Roboto for Inter. Roboto is a little bit narrow, and it
| turns out that Inter was developed by a Swede living in San
| Francisco, Rasmus Andersson, as a solution to a bunch of
| limitations he found with Roboto. It looked good and it was
| widely available free of charge. Tack sjalv, Rasmus!
| https://bcdevices.com/blogs/the-watershed/our-rebranding-eff...
| ftio wrote:
| So, this looks pretty nice, but does anyone else feel like
| there's been a surge in San Francisco clones?
|
| If you'd consider using this, why not just use San Francisco
| itself? I believe Apple supplies it for download so you can use
| it on any platform.
|
| Alternatively, if you're looking for something generic and
| familiar that _isn 't_ Apple's default, wouldn't it be better to
| use whatever the default font is on a given platform? Or better
| yet: choose a typeface that suits your brand and use it across
| all platforms?
|
| It's been a while since I had to make these kinds of decisions as
| a designer. Of course it could be that I haven't been thinking
| about this deeply enough, but these kinds of "budget" fonts don't
| resonate with me, particularly when the alternative is free.*
|
| * A good counterexample would be the surge in popularity of
| Gotham after Obama's first presidential run. Proxima Nova was a
| reasonable and widely available substitute for the fairly
| expensive Gotham.
| hhw3h wrote:
| I believe SF Pro's license doesn't allow for commercial use on
| websites. It's just for making mockups of software on Apple
| platforms.
| ev1 wrote:
| They don't provide it for download in a usable form - their
| download is in a .dmg Mac image, which inside is packaged as a
| single file .pkg.
|
| You can't easily use it or even extract it on other platforms.
| Also:
|
| > Subject to the terms of this License, you may use the Apple
| Font solely for creating mock-ups of user interfaces to be used
| in software products running on Apple's iOS, iPadOS, macOS or
| tvOS operating systems, as applicable. The foregoing right
| includes the right to show the Apple Font in screen shots,
| images, mock-ups or other depictions, digital and/or print, of
| such software products running solely on iOS, iPadOS, macOS or
| tvOS. Your use of the Apple Font shall also be subject to any
| specific use restrictions with respect thereto as set forth in
| the Apple Font or Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. You may
| use this Apple Font only for the purposes described in this
| License and only if you are a registered Apple Developer, or as
| otherwise expressly permitted by Apple in writing.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| > If you'd consider using this, why not just use San Francisco
| itself?
|
| Why not use a different font? Is it harmful in any way to use
| alternative fonts? What is the benefit of using San Francisco?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| _4 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15083231
|
| _3 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583
|
| Not an unknown entity really in the design world or general web
| dev circles, as it's been included in google fonts etc
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Ugh. Like most fonts this one does not appear to have been tested
| on Windows. On my 1440p monitor in Chrome the "inter bold sample"
| text all has noticeably jaggy edges.
|
| I swear modern graphics designers only test their designs on
| high-DPI mac laptops and smartphones.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Yeah same for me. On low 1080p) and mid DPI screens on Windows
| the font looks very blurry, as if there is no hinting at all.
| Thats unfortunate because otherwise I like this font.
| nness wrote:
| I'm a fan! It is certainly your Helvetica-inspired type, but the
| extra compression of the links/necks where letter strokes connect
| are pleasing and give it a nice character.
| airstrike wrote:
| 2018 post with 600+ comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583
| jaxn wrote:
| I have been using Inter in our SaaS product for a couple years.
| Two things I really like about Inter are the tabular numbers
| option, and the disambiguation option. I combine those two
| options in a "data" class to style text in data tables to get
| right aligned number columns, etc.
|
| One thing I don't love about Inter is how wide it is. It takes up
| a ton of space on mobile. While it is a variable font, it does
| not support variable width. This is addressed with Inter Display,
| but I believe that is still alpha and not recommended for use.
| specialist wrote:
| Do the variations of letter glyphs have unique names? Like the
| curly vs simplified versions of lower case 'a' and 'g'?
|
| I greatly prefer the simplified glyphs for programming. Like
| IBM's Plex.
|
| https://github.com/IBM/plex
|
| Adobe's Source Code Pro uses curly glyphs for the normal typeface
| and simplified for italics, which seems backwards to me.
|
| https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro
|
| I can't quickly refind the customizable font project with source
| code, where you recompile the typeface with the options you want.
| mrunseen wrote:
| "a" and "g" could be single-storey or double-storey. For
| example the font you've seeing now, Verdana, has double storey
| 'a' and single-storey 'g'.
| davidhunter wrote:
| This is the font used by Roam Research: http://roamresearch.com
| dan_pixelflow wrote:
| Designer here: Inter is my go-to font - a free (and incredibly
| made!) cross between Helvetica and SF Pro! Rasmus himself has
| worked at his fair share of Big Important Brands (part of the
| original team at Spotify, worked at Facebook, NodeJS, Dropbox,
| Figma) [0] and it's kinda crazy to me how much Rasmus has
| affected me: I see the Figma icon he created every day, I see the
| Spotify branding he founded, I use Inter, it's kinda crazy.
|
| Inter is the kind of font that you use when you need something
| that just works. Not too fancy, not too simple, it's perfect for
| so many things. And it's free. And it's open source [1]. What's
| not to like!
|
| [0] https://rsms.me/work [1] https://github.com/rsms/inter
|
| Edit: it's also not a new thing, and not a 'new SF clone' - it's
| been around since 2016[2].
|
| [2] https://rsms.me/work/inter/
| 5faulker wrote:
| The variable font is awesome too. Love that one can control the
| parameters to one's will.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Inter is not a good font at all... maybe for super short
| text/labels, but for larger ones it has bad kearning.
|
| If anybody wants a good example of how not-good looking Inter
| is for headlines/articles check out: https://thehill.com/
|
| I think part of the popularity is that it is free, and it is a
| decent enough grotesk font to do the job, but you wont get
| great results with it.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| the link looks fine
| _moof wrote:
| Would this be a good font to use on a small (2.8 inch) screen?
| I've got a little hobby hardware project I'm working on and am
| a total typography dunce.
| nine_k wrote:
| Depends on resolution and color depth / shades of gray. If
| you have few pixels, and / or 1-2 of bit color depth, you may
| be better off with a bitmapped font.
|
| If your display is many hundreds of pixels wide and has and
| several shades for antialiasing, any good font designed and
| hinted for screens would work.
| jfim wrote:
| Unibody 8 [0] is pretty excellent if you're dealing with a
| low resolution raster device. It looks like this in action:
| https://twitter.com/underware/status/947439103645245440
|
| [0] https://underware.nl/fonts/unibody/styles
| junon wrote:
| Wow it's actually an honor to respond here. I've used Inter in
| my app boilerplate for a while now and we _love_ it.
|
| Thank you so much for your work.
| sho_hn wrote:
| OP is _a_ designer, not _the_ designer.
| r5Khe wrote:
| To be clear, the author of the parent you're responding to is
| not the designer of Inter, they are simply _a_ designer.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I beg to differ - for UX/UI, especially small screens you want
| large counters and tracking, as well as much higher x-heights
| than Inter.
|
| It's a great general purpose font, but not the best for UX/UI.
| SF Pro has SF Pro Compact to deal with aforementioned issues
| (It is used on Apple Watch).
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| > much higher x-heights than Inter.
|
| Large x-heights make me sad; I think they're helpful in
| screens the size of a phone or smaller, but I don't like them
| on desktops. Inter's x-heights are already beyond my personal
| aesthetic tastes.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I should clarify the purpose of x-heights and how it
| relates to legibility.
|
| Taller x-heights leads to better optical legibility in
| small sizes.
|
| Shorter x-heights are usually found in fonts such as Source
| Serif Pro for obvious reasons - it leads to be better shape
| recognition of the words and improved readability.
| Excellent in long prose and text use. Usually "Book" fonts
| have very short x-height. One of my favorites is Nexus
| Serif: https://www.martinmajoor.com/4_nexus.html
|
| For UX/UI - ever wondered by EXIT signs are in all caps and
| not written as Exit? It's because of the relation of
| x-height to legibility at small sizes or larger distances.
| This is the same for avionics, warning labels, etc.
|
| Inter isn't a good font for UX/UI IMO for the same reason
| why Helvetica and SF Pro aren't. They're general purpose
| fonts - neither good at text nor UX/UI but somewhere in the
| middle.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is rather overstating the shortcomings for small sizes -
| Apple _only_ uses SF Compact on the Watch; SF Text is used on
| even the smallest elements in iOS and macOS. Inter reduces
| approximately as well.
|
| As for tracking, it's already a good practice to use a
| slightly higher `letter-spacing` value at small sizes
| (something UIkit does automatically), so this isn't really a
| function of the font family.
| supernintendo wrote:
| Inter is probably my favorite font for desktop user interfaces.
| It's always one of the first things I setup on a new Linux
| install.
| petters wrote:
| The automatic rendering of "3x9" into "3x9" is not a good default
| IMO. The page says it is usually enabled by default.
|
| The other contextual changes look good.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I've loved using Inter for a long time, and I'm glad they finally
| fixed some odd kerning/letter spacing issues between certain
| letters that always bothered me and prevented me from using it on
| projects.
|
| I think Inter is getting more popular (since it's free) and
| replacing other popular ones like Circular that cost an arm and a
| leg, and pretty "look the same" in the lay-person's eyes.
|
| There's a whole slew of similar, free typefaces now: Public Sans
| (https://public-sans.digital.gov/), Work Sans
| (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Work+Sans), Metropolis
| (https://fontsarena.com/metropolis-by-chris-simpson/)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Big fan of Public Sans. It's got character and has excellent
| legibility.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Dayum, Metropolis is a nice font! Thanks for the links =)
| eh9 wrote:
| I love Inter- it's the first free font I've found with great and
| useful features[1]
|
| [1] https://rsms.me/inter/#features
| chrononaut wrote:
| Slightly OT and something I never investigated: I noticed that I
| can load this typeface within G-Suite (say, Presentations). Is it
| possible to customize the tracking of typefaces within G-Suite
| applications? The spacing between letters for this typeface is
| slightly too much for my personal preference in G-Suite.
| kylefox wrote:
| Inter is the secret weapon for a lot of product/UI designers.
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| Huge fan of Inter - I use Inter for all of my projects, this is
| my go-to font for everything. It's not simple and looks modern.
|
| If you folks have not used, I highly recommend it to try it out!
| fleaaaa wrote:
| If someone adores Inter but also uses CJK, I highly recommend
| Pretendard, a fork of Inter. First thing I do after refreshing OS
| is installing this font. It's such a good font for horrid windows
| cjk system.
|
| https://github.com/orioncactus/pretendard
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(page generated 2021-07-30 23:01 UTC)