Inter UI, a typeface designed for user interfaces | Hacker News Reader

Inter UI, a typeface designed for user interfaces

rsms.me

664 pointsdsego92 comments

If you're looking for a UI font that's non-specific to your design (ie. you're not designing a poster) then I recommend the following:

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";

Everything else is less user friendly. This loads instantly, looks perfect on the user's screen, and is guaranteed to look exactly as it's supposed to.

Agreed. Few designs benefit enough from a custom font to justify the downsides of not using the standard system font.

As an aside, we will soon be able to use system-ui in place of a manually constructed font stack: https://caniuse.com/#feat=font-family-system-ui

What are the downsides, load time aside?

Besides just the load time, there’s the “pop” effect of the text not being visible until the font loads (or slightly better but still not great, the page shifting around as default fonts get subbed out for your custom font with different metrics).

On macOS and iOS specifically, the system font (San Francisco) has had a great deal of time and effort poured into readability — so much that rather than being a singular font, it’s a massive family of fonts or metafont with countless variants for various DPIs and use cases. For example, the “San Francisco” used for headings (h1, h2, etc) uses wider glyphs and more relaxed kerning, as is appropriate for headings and the “San Francisco” used for small text uses a variant that has its geometry tweaked to be more legible. It’s a free readability boost that all happens automatically when you use system-ui or -apple-system in your font stack. By using a custom font, you forfeit all of that.

The pop effect can be tamed with, for example, font-display: optional;, which allows the first page load to use the fallback fonts.

Might want to throw a “system-ui” in there too, from CSS 4. This works for me in Safari sand Chrome.

Yes, system-ui is how the system font is specified in modern browsers: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-4/#valdef-font-family-system...

I wonder why they didn't just change the browser default? Seems odd that it's still Times New Roman.

Firefox bug for this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226042

This one includes a few more devices:

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif

What about Noto?

Can't one just use font:menu?

>Everything else is less user friendly.

Not really.

By using a font like Inter UI you create the same experience for everybody, regardless of the platform.

Segoe UI, Ubuntu, Cantarell (Windows, Ubuntu, Gnome/Fedora) are within a different typographic category than San Francisco or Roboto, they're not even similar enough to each other. By using the system font stack you're basically fragmenting the user experience and look and feel.

Inter is a substitute for well crafted neo grotesque fonts loved by designers, like San Francisco (which itself is a better fitting alternative to Helvetica), it's of a similar quality.

I'm sorry but have you considered that there are people who don't actually own a Mac?

As I see it, this is very centric to a specific system and therefore does not offer the best user experience for everyone.

Arial (and Segoe UI now) should be readily available to windows users, and sans-serif should cover the rest I think.

fair, I mixed that up.

Isn’t sans-serif a catchall which means the emoji fonts will never be used?

The list has two purposes: fallback in case a particular font doesn't exist on the client, and fallback in case a particular glyph doesn't exist in the font. When you use emoji that aren't in the sans-serif font, it'll fall back to the listed emoji fonts for that individual glyph.

For anyone like me who might think that this is a pretty looking typeface but not particularly fully featured, scroll down the page to this bit: https://rsms.me/inter/#features

This is an amazingly well featured typeface where the author clearly has considered a number of use cases, particularly in terms of legibility at small sizes which is important for UI. This looks great! File size may be an issue for public web UIs, as someone mentioned, but there are so many more places this could be used to great effect. Will definitely consider for future projects!

Ah, I was thinking there was no slashed zero, but scrolled further after reading your comment - it is indeed there as an option!

FYI: it's a bit easier to spot the variations if you highlight both the Disabled and Enabled examples in a line. The light-green blocks by themselves definitely make it harder for me to make out the details, but once highlighted the improvements are much more obvious.

What's the difference between 2:34, FE—X and 12:34, FE—X, 4.2 and 4.2, (SEMI)PERMANENT and (SEMI)PERMANENT? I can see no difference.

I assume the long dashes are replaced with a single character. For the colon and decimal points, they are slightly higher. For the time, the colon lines up with the middle of the numbers instead of the baseline.

The differences are very subtle (but nice).

The colon, the dash and the parentheses are moved slightly up so that they look more balanced with the surrounding characters. The difference with the dot is very subtle and I cannot quite catch it.

Wow, it even has a visible difference for capital ß (ẞ) which is usually barely perceptible.

It even has an interrobang ligature!

I really like the typeface, so I hope this comment won't come off as too negative. In the FAQ the author mentions that you can fetch the typeface directly from his site. I'd advise against relying on third-parties without contractual obligations to you in production.

If you decide to take this risk anyway then you should take steps to reduce the risk of future security issues. The most important thing is to use use Subresource Integrity [0] on your <link> tags. However, since the author doesn't provide versioned URLs (the query strings are only being used to bust the cache, not to select which file is served), this would likely cause your site to break on each release. Usually CDNs give you a URL which includes the version as part of the path.

Another issue is that SRI only checks top level resources, there's no equivalent for external fonts and images which get included from the stylesheet [1]. It doesn't seem like the largest attack vector, but you never know what kinds of browser bugs might pop up.

Finally, Cache-Control has a max-age of 4 hours. If you don't expect these resource to change then you'd want the value to be way longer.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-subresource-integrity/issue...

Looks good! I haven't seen many variable fonts around yet. The samples include mock notebooks and poster layouts, but I'd love to see examples of it being used in an actual interface. (Outside of the site, which uses it.)

Also—not mentioned too prominently on the site—but it's open source as well! Awesome work. https://github.com/rsms/inter

The team behind the iA Writer app recently released three variable fonts with an open source licence on Github. Details here:

https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas

Woah! I've followed their work and loved Nitti after finding it in their app, but I missed this. Thanks for sharing.

It's actually used on GitHub's homepage when you're logged out.

TeX can use other fonts, but the default set of fonts used in TeX are "variable fonts". The term Knuth used was "metafonts", which is why the font-rasterizing program he wrote for TeX is called METAFONT. So you've probably read a number of books and many papers typeset in "variable fonts", as well as most of the math formulas on Wikipedia and in Jupyter.

In fact Knuth wrote a wonderful article explaining the idea. The article is available online, and is just an explanation but a superb performance — “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, by Donald E. Knuth, in Visible Language, XVI 1 (Winter 1982): https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/... (Republished in the book/collection Digital Typography.) So he seems to have invented the idea, at least as far as computers go.

It's more accurate to say they were variable fonts. The Computer Modern used by modern LaTeX distributions was converted from METAFONT to Type 1 in 1992. In the process, specific parameter values had to be chosen - in my opinion, chosen badly, so as to make modern Computer Modern very difficult to read on screen at small sizes because it's too darn light. :(

Reasonable replacements included in most LaTeX distributions include the XCharter or libertine packages for text fonts; eulervm or newtxmath for math fonts; or mathpazo for both.

Despite all the talk about being optimized for screen rendering, it sure looks lot blurrier and less even on my system than for example the classic Verdana, or the more modern Segoe UI

Here is quick and dirty comparison shot:

https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HU2mq37.png?o=1

That does look way blurrier. Interesting though, since it seems to work fine on my screen. Are you using a standard pt / px size?

The hinting renders poorly on your system. Aside from the fuzziness?, the T and top of z are thicker than bottom of z.

That's clearly rendering without any hints.

The page mentions they have both hinted and unhinted files you can use... but they recommend only using them for Windows where users prefer that look. (You clearly do.) I'm guessing you're using the unhinted one?

I downloaded the zip, both the unhinted and hinted files looks the same in the font previewer at least. Compared to Segoe UI both look quite blurry.

So I compared the lower-case alphabet in Wordpad (in Word all fonts look shit, way to go MS), and it seems the hinting is only applied to first four letters of the alphabet.

https://imgur.com/a/b1POgyN

edit: added difference image to the above album to highlight the issue

Windows 10 1809.

On my Linux and Firefox, font looks unpleasantly blurred in small sizes on their page. Maybe our hinting settings are different than theirs but that should not be a problem in a quality font.

Kerning in digits looks off in their example: https://i.imgur.com/AURrPtn.png (this is an example where fixed-width is disabled), don't know how pervasive this odd kerning is, or if this is bad only in the browser. Another example of bad kerning: https://i.imgur.com/PIYJgIz.png One more example: https://i.imgur.com/bOM4MZB.png

Since this font contains the feature, let me mention one of my pet peeves in the hopes of raising awarenes: whatever you do, do NOT blanket enable the Discretionary Ligatures (dlig) feature across all of your header/body text. Use it sparingly, pinpointed to where you know in advance there are specific glyphs in the text that need to look different. Enabling it all across your text with no regard on what text there will be will result in all kinds of unintended ligatures making the text appear bizarre, ugly and unprofessional, especially if there is any chance your text will be localized into non-latin languages.

can you give an example of where unintended ligatures could appear?

Discretionary ligatures are typically decorative in nature and should be used very sparingly, lest legibility deteriorates. See the examples at [1].

[1] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-3/sig...

ah, like this example here: https://justmaku.org/2018-06-19-amazon-leaking-ebooks

the st ligature is startling every time i see it, tripping me out of the flow of reading.

I think if anybody is interested in using this as a webfont, you should take a look at the file sizes of the typeface. They're about 100-200kb each, which adds up if you're using multiple font weights. It could be significant depending on the context of your app.

Apparently this is because the font has a lot of glyphs that may not exist in other optimized web fonts (relevant GitHub issue: https://github.com/rsms/inter/issues/53).

As mentioned in that issue and the linked one, subsetting makes a huge difference, and can be done yourself. As not mentioned there, you can even split the subsets by Unicode range and let browsers handle which chunks to download. Browser support is even pretty good.[0]

https://caniuse.com/#feat=font-unicode-range

Huh, I had no idea this was even a thing - that it's supported by even IE 11 is nothing short of incredible!

I highly recommend using Font Squirrel for creating webfont packages. They support loads of options for reducing size, but the defaults are great too. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

This font (under default metrics settings) reminds me of Apple’s San Francisco. Is it similar, or are my eyes just deceiving me? (I’d check myself, but I’m on my phone at the moment.)

It is ‘similar’ in every way.

It's a very similar style with very similar objectives, so it's not entirely coincidence. It's also very similar to Google's Roboto for the same reasons.

Even though the objectives are similar, it’s hard to tell apart from San Francisco, whilst roboto is quite clearly different.

To me it looks almost the exact same, but there's some small differences. These two fonts are exceedingly similar.

That capital U is kind of horrible though. No compensation at large size for what the human eye perceives as a line-curve discontinuity on the inside of the glyph?

I like this much better than the typical Linux UI fonts, too. It looks cleaner and more visually pleasing. Would certainly enjoy using a desktop with this.

I just set my desktop UI to this font. everything is pretty now. It almost feels like I'm on macOS :)

I had to choose a font recently, working with the client there were a few things such as 'no I don't want the eyeglasses g' and 'no I don't want descenders on numbers' and that was how we arrived at using 'Ubuntu' to fall back to the native font stack. This I was pleased with as Ubuntu is a system font on Ubuntu so working on a website where there is no need to download a 'Google Font' helps immensely when the cache is off.

However, I didn't like the 'M' and 'W' in Ubuntu, so I think I will be suggesting that we revise the font to this neat Inter UI font, loaded with 'defer' and the system fallbacks including Ubuntu.

This font is a very neat piece of work. It satisfies the 'g' and numbers requirements and is sans-serif. I can't wait to get working with it.

Is it English/Latin only? What about localized interfaces?

Looks like apart from standard Helvetica/Apple/Microsoft fonts there’s a very small choice of fonts you can use if you have multi lingual UI.

It’s like creating a Latin font is relatively easy, but very few of them go all the way to full Unicode support.

By opening the font file using FontDrop (https://fontdrop.info), you can see that it supports 39 languages:

Afrikaans Albanian Azerbaijani Belarusian Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Maltese Norwegian Ossetic Polish Portugese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanisch Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Uzbek Vietnamese Zulu

I love the way this font looks to an irrational extent. Will use in my work.

It has the 80s modern vibe with today's technology. It definitely tickles something deep down in my mind too.

The site seems to constantly crash mobile Safari in my iPhone X?

I’m getting “A problem repeatedly occurred while trying to load...” after it crashes and tries to reload several times.

I think the first time I’ve ever seen that actually.

Looks pretty but I wish the website showed it as a webfont instead of just a picture, so I can see how it will really look on my system (the differences in hinting can be substantial)

Checkout the samples page: https://rsms.me/inter/samples/

I didn't notice the navbar at the top at first too!

Hey thanks! Unfortunately only the first block appears to be text :(

Sigh. Yet another sans-serif font family.

Yes, they are easier to design, and easier to parameterize, which is nice for you, the designer. But they are not nice for me, the reader. Using a sans font says to me that your comfort is more important than mine, and that your time is worth more than mine and everyone else's, combined.

In Firefox, I have disabled web fonts, and use Libertine everywhere. That choice is denied to me in Firefox on my phone.

I don't quite understand your criticism of sans-serif fonts.

However I wanted to address your last sentence. Perhaps you could try to see if the "Stylus" add-on works on Firefox mobile. I haven't tried it myself but it should.

I love this typeface and I’m using it for a lot of stuff @ MNT, including the Reform brand. And it’s also pleasant as a GUI font on Linux desktops.

It's a great font with a lot of features, and it is visually very similar with Roboto. I just wish it had a thinner variant (font weight 300).

Aren’t all these sans-serif grotesque fonts just Helvetica emulators?

Not quite. There are actual Helvetica clones such a Arial and Nimbus Sans, but I would say these contemporary UI fonts fall somewhere between classic grotesques and the humanist types of Frutiger and Myriad.

Looks like you just have to wait some more https://mobile.twitter.com/rsms/status/1078362207367290881

That's great news. Looking at the github there are even prerelease builds of a light variant [1]

https://github.com/rsms/inter/issues/14

This is a beautiful typeface, but I can't tell capital 'I' as in Italy apart from lowercase 'l' as in 'lasagne'.

Scroll further down the page - there are alternative display options to disambiguate capital i from lowercase l as well as slashed zeroes etc.

I'm not a designer, but to my non-professional eyes this looks good.

Do you think this font would be a good choice for a text editor?

I'd stick to monospace fonts for text editors

Even if it's a SaaS app for general writing, not a code editor? (I guess I should've clarified this right away)

This supports being monospaced by the looks of it - scroll down to the tabular data feature. The font really has a wide variety of options.

It's tabular numbers only, not letters.

And "automatically monospacing" any font that is designed proportionally will look terrible, so stick to an entirely monospace font.

Very pretty, but am I the only person who, at first glance, thinks it's not all that distinguishable from Helvetica? It's got an Arial-style 'R', but short of that...

I and l (capital i and lowercase ell) look the same or nearly the same at normal sizes. So I'll stick with Source Sans Pro or Noto Sans.

Scroll down. There is a whole section of variations for just that purpose.

First, this isn't designed as a programming font. It's designed as a UI font.

Second, they have a toggle for that, it's on the linked page.

It's a visually very pleasant font. Thanks for sharing this, definitely considering it now.

Lowercase l looks identical to capital i. It's pretty, but for informational displays, it can be very confusing.

Scroll down: You can use the cv04 font feature to change the style of the lowercase l!

Needs a [2017] in the title.

Beautiful!

A truly stunning font.

I am split. This font is amazing - finally a better alternative to Helvetica, but wouldn't be better if they have used their energy on improving their CPUs?

I think you might be confusing "Inter" with "Intel". This font is named "Inter UI" since its design goal is for use in user interfaces. It doesn't have anything to do with Intel.

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