New Fonts on macOS Catalina | Hacker News Reader

New Fonts on macOS Catalina

typography.guru

114 pointstosh25 comments

So, what’s the point of something being a “system font” if it isn’t used for display by anything in the OS itself? Does some first-party app use them, e.g. GarageBand’s first-party VSTs? Or are they just there to provide you options for styling your own text in Pages et al? (And, if so, why not make them visible in the Text Styles OS modal in such apps, with them zero-installed on first selection? They’re nigh-undiscoverable as it is.)

I recently had Safari offer to download a font for me so I could view a webpage. Perhaps that’s why they exist?

Proxima Nova is very common on websites so from that perspective it makes sense to bundle it.

If a website declares a CSS @font-face rule that defines font-family foo, and then later uses `font-family: foo` in a style; and foo is also the name of a system font-family; do browsers then skip the @font-face "version" of the font and use the system one instead? Hopefully not bothering to even download the web font?

I've never run into this case, despite using web fonts a couple of times, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone attempting to use a font that's a system font of an OS as a web font.

But that seems like the main use-case here: knowing that at least macOS ships with Proxima Nova, you'd declare a dependency on the Google Fonts copy of Proxima Nova as a polyfill of sorts; and then the OSes that have it would use their version instead of needing to pull it from Google.

There’s a local function for @font-face that allows you to link a webfont to a locally installed font and it will indeed skip the download if it can find it.

Relevant: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...

Thank you!!! Learnt something today.

My guess is that they are (or will be) used in Pages/Keynote templates.

Posted 8 days ago with the original title without gaining any traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428245

This is a really pleasant surprise from Apple. Klim and Commercial Type employ some of the most talented type designers in the industry and licenses for their fonts would usually cost you many hundreds of dollars, so it's great for graphic designers to have have them more widely available.

I think you can't use it for public works unless you have a valid license.

From a comment by Ralf Herrmann on the page:

> > Great, but what about license details – what kind of usage is permitted? I can't seem to find any EULAs anywhere.

> The Mac OS Eula applies. Like with other bundled OS fonts, there are very few restrictions. You just can’t move the files away from the system and you can’t override the embedding restrictions.

> Here is the Eula: > https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSCatalina.pdf

> The relevant part is:

>> E. Fonts. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the fonts included with the Apple Software to display and print content while running the Apple Software; however, you may only embed fonts in content if that is permitted by the embedding restrictions accompanying the font in question. These embedding restrictions can be found in the Font Book/Preview/Show Font Info panel.

Is there something regional about this? While I do have a bunch of fonts I can download, Proxima Nova is not in the list.

When I read your comment I used the search box to look for Proxima Nova and I swear I also could not find it.

Then later I clicked on all fonts and scrolled down and there it was. Can you try another time?

Why do these fonts have to be hidden in there, never to be seen by a high percentage of users? I'd imagine a cleverer UI would be to have them available in a text editor's font chooser, but with some sort of indication that the font will be downloaded if you choose to use it.

Although obviously, then, people who are somewhere without internet connection will complain about not being able to use many fonts...

Probably the font APIs weren't really designed for this in mind so it can't just be dropped in as-is.

Yep, this feels like a first step rather than an end state.

Licensing, probably. Apple doesn't have to pay unless a user actually downloads the font.

This seems way more likely than the disk usage cost.

Why do these fonts have to be hidden in there, never to be seen by a high percentage of users?

Probably to save disk space, since Macs often have smaller storage since the switch to SSDs. People who use fonts heavily will see them in Font Book.

Similarly, 99½% of Mac users will never install the extra voices, or high-quality versions of the macOS default voices.

These fonts are tiny. Like hundreds of kilobytes per variant, at most. Nothing like the voices, at hundreds of megabytes per variant. (I'm sure there's also a licensing cost tied to each download there.)

> high-quality versions of the macOS default voices.

How do I do that?

It's in System Preferences, under Accessibility > Speech.

The first thing I do when setting up a new install of MacOS is to load the Input Font, https://input.fontbureau.com/

It’s a great monospaced font for the terminal and occasionally I’ve set it as the system wide font.

I noticed macOS has SF Mono installed. I was able to embed this in PDFs using locally available tools.

I shall therefore assume I have an implicit license to redistribute material set in this typeface.

Surely they couldn’t have meant to ship this face to me purely for my own local delectations? It must have been included so that I could make fair use by sharing work with others?! Thanks, Apple!

Not the case? So? Sue me!

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