Inter – open source and legible typeface | Hacker News Reader

Inter – open source and legible typeface

github.com

176 pointsstockkid27 comments

Previously discussed (664 points, 92 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583

I have been working with this font since the last time it was posted here and I am far from bored of it. I did contact Rasmus the developer as I needed a little bit of help self hosting it, Rasmus got back to me very quickly which was very nice.

If anyone is using this font do note that it is no longer 'Inter UI' but 'Inter'. Update your CSS accordingly even though there is a legacy @import for the old font name.

Also take note of the glyphs, there are plenty of them and you can use them for UI elements.

If you are doing fractions in your HTML then Inter will do a neat job of displaying them. Calling this a 'font' is an understatement, it does it all and redefines what a font should be - variable, fully featured and with excellent support in Rasmus + contributors.

This project has one of the best designed homepages and introductions to a project I've seen for a long time: https://rsms.me/inter/

Heh, yeah, it's almost like the project was created by a professional designer.

Ha! You'd be surprised. I've seen some dreadfully unusable pages designed by celebrated designers. I think there's a distinction between designers who focus on visuals and effects and those who actually produce good overall experiences. This person clearly falls into the latter and, I argue, smaller group.

More UI than UI/UX. I'd prefer a UX expert overall, it would at least imply a reasonably decent UI.

Just as an FYI, I believe Rasmus was the original Design Lead at Spotify.

Yeah it's a very nice and clean homepage. Anyone know if there's a template for a page like this, (looking to use it with hugo if possible)

Thanks

I looked at that page and was impressed. Does anyone here have suggestions on freely licensed serif fonts that focus on readability (non-system fonts)?

You may be interested in Source Serif Pro[1]. Incidentally, Times (New) Roman was also designed with legibility at very small sizes in mind, though unfortunately it's become the very defintion of bland serif font. You may also want to check out Charter[2].

[1] https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-serif-pro/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Charter

"Does anyone here have suggestions on freely licensed serif fonts that focus on readability (non-system fonts)?"

Not a serif font...but in 2013 Intel released a sans-serif font called Clear Sans, designed for on-screen legibility.

The font was designed and created by type designer Daniel Ratighan and is available under the Apache 2.0 License.

https://01.org/clear-sans

Perhaps Google Noto (Sans and Serif): https://www.google.com/get/noto/

I switched last time this was posted and I've liked it a lot.

With Cinnamon on Fedora it's very pretty.

Part of the legibility is your screen time, how much time did your spend reading that font. I'm using DejaVu Sans for about 10 years and while there may be slightly better fonts, it's not worth it to change it. Just pick one font and stick with it, don't change it every six months. This goes for websites and OS as well.

Arbitrary changes are annoying because you are losing your hard learned visual parser settings.

On mobile when I'm about to read longer article I use plugin to change all elements to medium size black on white sans-serif.

For legibility, consistency and familiarity is more important than finding the perfect font.

Yes, but the perfect font would still be perfect. Which could benefit people that are not unbiased yet.

Maybe someone could explain to a font-illiterate what is different about a new font like this, why do people keep making new ones, and won't all new ideal, clean, readable fonts converge to be indistinguishable from each other because they have the same requirements?

What's considered "ideal" changes. For UI typefaces the medium they're used for has changed (HIDPI screens are the norm now), so it's causing a small renaissance of type design for screens.

Kinda wanting to have this set the default system font for MacOS replacing San Francisco. Unfortunately requiring a lot of hacking around the OS to do so.

If your UX requires a font that is optimized for rendering at small sizes, it's bad UX. Just use a larger font size instead.

Reminds me a lot of San Francisco, though the terminals are a bit more oblique.

Any font where l and I are too similar is not legible to me.

Click the sample image and scroll down to the Alternate Forms.

What exactly is the difference between an open source font and a free font? I mean, don't we also have the bitmaps?

This is the raw text source used to generate the .otf, .ttf, and .woff2 font files:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rsms/inter/master/src/Inte...

Most fonts are vectors (font scaling is mostly just simple vector math) rather than bitmaps. Additionally, the vector format fonts use internally is highly optimized for usage performance (think about how much text is rendered on a screen at a time or in a document), and to a lesser extent storage size, and not always particularly useful in reverse engineering (reverse designing?) the designer's intent for a given glyph.

Some open source fonts you can see every source control change of SVG documents or similar, which eventually get fed into a font processor for "compilation" into the final font formats.

I'm not sure if it's not rendered correctly in my browser, but I think the kerning could be improved.

nice looking font

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