The Inter typeface family | Hacker News Reader

The Inter typeface family

rsms.me

339 pointsBrajeshwar95 comments

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/

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

OP is a designer, not the designer.

Derp, I'm an idiot.

not your fault. That comment was misleadingly ambiguous. ("Designer here" and nothing later disambiguated.)

To be clear, the author of the parent you're responding to is not the designer of Inter, they are simply _a_ designer.

The variable font is awesome too. Love that one can control the parameters to one's will.

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.

the link looks fine

The o often has too much space around it in the middle of words. In "stave" the v cleaves too close to the e. (IMO).

The Hill isn't relevant at all. Every headline and the body all use 'Graphik', not Inter.

Hi user here.

Is there a estimated release date of the Inter Display font?

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/)

Big fan of Public Sans. It's got character and has excellent legibility.

Dayum, Metropolis is a nice font! Thanks for the links =)

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 själv, Rasmus! https://bcdevices.com/blogs/the-watershed/our-rebranding-eff...

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.

“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’.

> I can't quickly refind the customizable font project with source code, where you recompile the typeface with the options you want.

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

Indian Government blocks a webpage[1] from this site, for no reason.

[1]: https://rsms.me/inter/glyphs/

Indeed. Utterly ridiculous.

What does that even mean? You can’t block a single page on an HTTPS site unless you can decrypt the traffic.

You just reminded me of one of my favorite YouTube videos of all time. https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw

Seriously. I don't know how they're bypassing https.

Most likely they proxy traffic, act as a CA, and mandate devices used on ISPs have them as a trusted root authority.

I can access the page just fine from India

All I want is Inter Mono wink

Get Jetbrains Mono, it's awesome

Yeah, that's what I, and AFAIK rsms uses.

that would be amazing! If it's anything like SF Pro → SF Mono, it would be great.

I don't like SF Mono.

I use Cascadia with it (I know, poor license compatibility microsoft bad yadda yadda), and it goes together quite nice besides the inconsistent weighting.

Under what OS? I find Cascadia Code on macOS very thick, almost like a bold font.

I'm on Linux, using subpixel antialiasing (very similar to Mac) and I've had the same experience. I do appreciate the thickness, but sometimes I switch it to the light/mediumlight to match it with my system font (Inter)

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?

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.

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

Very clean. I clicked hoping to see a mono variant - I’m always on the lookout for good terminal fonts. Maybe one day!

what's your current favorite terminal font?

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)

Perhaps surprisingly, Consolas. Slashed zero, great readability at small and large sizes, good hinting for both low and high DPI screens, easy to read/scan in large blocks, very wide support.

Source Code Pro.

There's also Office Code Pro [1], a variant with slashed zeroes, less stylized bangs and different lowercase "i" and "g", among other subtleties.

[1] https://github.com/nathco/Office-Code-Pro

That's a new one to me - thank you very much for linking it. I always hated the dotted zero source code pro has, so this might become a new favourite.

Check “Basier Mono” from Atipo. Regular weight is free and the other weights are quite cheap.

Weird to see “aåbc” though, since in Norway our alphabet goes “abc…xyzæøå”. It’s like… they took the two very most distant letters in the alphabet and placed them next to each other :S

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!

He has no excuse for using Ø for zero then!

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://i.imgur.com/1RDMuwF.png

Honestly, it looks like shit due to the Latin small letter i and j being wrongly positioned, and the kerning in general is faulty (e.g. see the Latin small letter p in the words "shape" or "glyphs", or the Latin small letter e in "zero"). This is on a correctly working Linux system, no other fonts exhibit these problems.

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.

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...

This is the font used by Roam Research: http://roamresearch.com

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

Are graphs in the font the same as Inter?

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.

I never realized there were so many variable facets to font design until reading through this. Very well done

I love Inter- it’s the first free font I’ve found with great and useful features[1]

[1] https://rsms.me/inter/#features

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!

2018 post with 600+ comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583

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.

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?

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.

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 :)

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.

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

Inter is an overhyped project and a mediocre font design. Sorry, but somebody had to say it.

Inter is the secret weapon for a lot of product/UI designers.

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.

fyi it's the font used by notion.so

Kind of gives me NYC Subway font vibes

This looks nice but I've never seen ¿¡ combined into a single glyph before and found it hard to recognize.

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.

Oh that's interesting, I had never seen it before either and assumed it was automatically replacing "¿¡".

The automatic rendering of "3x9" into "3×9" is not a good default IMO. The page says it is usually enabled by default.

The other contextual changes look good.

when I looked at the "Inter" name I though it was about the football team

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_Milan

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...

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?

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.

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.

Which itself is a replica of Akzidenz Grotesk.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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