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Comment by kbd | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer I have strong opinions about my monospace font, but if I want to make a UI or display very readable sans text what’s the best option? Roboto Flex? Inter?

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Noto Sans, Inter and San Francisco are the top class of modern display fonts.

I had thought of mentioning San Francisco. I didn’t because it’s an Apple-only choice but your comment makes me appreciate it more. Noto looks great. It seems like with these configurable fonts you can use the same face for body text and have it still look good in headings at a different weight.

For some reason the lack of distinction between open an close quote marks in Noto Sans really bothers me, they look almost identical unless you look real close. It is a fine font face but I have a hard time appreciating it because I can’t look past this—in my opinion ugly—design choice.

DejaVu Sans is also fine, so is Fira Sans, or Railway if you want to add some style in addition to readability.

Honestly if you don’t care about style your system’s sans serifs is probably fine (or DejaVu if it isn’t). And if you care about style go with a font that matches your design.

These are great choices. I was going to mention Inter and San Francisco.

Whenever I stumble upon a website with great body text, it often happens to be using one of these two typefaces.

If you can pay, Helvetica is considered the gold standard.

Helvetica is a fantastic print font, as display font.. not so much. It starts becoming decent at high DPI and mid+ sizes, which disqualifies it from being a good all-arounder display font. Something designers tend to forget. A display font needs to be readable on many devices and screen conditions.

True. I take it back.

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