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Comment by sneela | Hacker News Reader

As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves.

Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :)

This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone...

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/

[2]: https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Preview: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text...

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Marissa Mayer on why Google chose sans-serif fonts for search results:

When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.

The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.

Here's the 2006 talk: https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/nine-lessons-learned-abou...

Shoutout to Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, designed for the Braille Institut having excellent glyph differentiation ("Next" with variable weight)

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Next

I'm extremely picky and Atkinson Hyperlegible was my favorite variable-width font. Never knew there's a "Next", so +

This is what I switch to whenever a default font annoys me because of poor glyph differentiation. It's what it says on the tin.

IBM Plex is very good. Recently, I have been enjoying https://rsms.me/inter/ for interfaces a bit more (with ss02 for body and ss02+tnum for tables activated).

Inter is the only libre typeface that has good coverage, and produces readable small text on terrible 80 DPI displays. I've tested probably hundreds of them.

But l and I (ell and eye) are identical in Inter.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter?preview.text=lllll%2...

I never understood why a font designer would ever choose to do that. There should be an ironclad rule that different letters must look different.

You did not check my link and ss02 out, did you?

Then tell me where to download that ss02 and install on PC for docx file and set default in browser?

Hasn't Inter been the default tech font for the last 5 years or so by virtue of being the default font in Figma? The Times New Roman of UI.

I think you have it the other way around.

It's not used because it's the default font in Figma.

It's the fact that it's the best modern alternative to Helvetica, making it universally useful and therefore the default in Figma.

Incidentally, I'll forever mourn that the designers didn't choose to go with a glyph for "1" that is closer to the one in Helvetica.

Inter is the default in Figma because the first designer at Figma was the guy who created it.

Huh, TIL. Thank you!

I guess I can try to argue that it if it weren't as generally useful as Helvetica it wouldn't have been made the default in Figma and it wouldn't be, well, so generally used.

Hah, this one can go on Wikipedia as an example for "chicken or the egg"! IMO, there's probably a number of other fonts that could've been chosen rather than Inter as default Figma font, and if they had been, they'd now be more ubiquitous than Inter. Of course, we'll never know. Unless someone here is looking to do a research study into popularity of fonts over time compared to popularity of Figma and seeing how strong the correlation is - maybe a weekend project for someone into typography ;)

Oh, is that why everyone uses it? I just assumed people wanted knockoff San Francisco on purpose

Ah, it initially appeared that the capital I and the lowercase L have identical-looking glyphs. But scrolling down, I see the ss02 and tnum features add noticeable glyphs. Looks like a nice typeface.

Inter has also become my default.

Nice. Inter even has "U+1E9E" "Latin Capital Letter Sharp S" and two lower case sharp s variants as well.

Is U+1E9E used for anything besides ALLCAPS text?

Probably not.

Inter or linter?

Feature ss02 Disambiguation (one of many)

Alternate glyph set that increases visual difference between similar-looking characters.

Why isn't it the default? :( I'm rarely in control of how a font is used.

My full list of ambiguous letters, from https://gajus.com/blog/avoiding-visually-ambiguous-character...

- O / 0 - I / l / 1 / 7 - 5 / S - 2 / Z - 8 / B - 6 / G - 9 / q / g

I use the following:

  $ cat passgen.sh                                                           
  #!/bin/sh
  export LC_ALL=C
  printf "%.16s\n" "$(/usr/bin/openssl rand -base64 32 | /usr/bin/tr -d 'lIOSBGZ')"

This way if it looks like a number then it is. I don't usually mess up q/g and u/v with my fonts but its easy enough to ban more characters.

O / D can also be an issue with some fonts.

U / V

Likewise the absence of a stroke through the zero. Without context, for example in a Wifi password, indistinguishable from uppercase letter O.

I really enjoyed reading through [1] as it gives a lot of insight into what goes into making a font. However I wonder what incentives does IBM have for putting this much work into making it public, accessible and widely used. Wouldn't the ubiquity of the font make it less strong for their brand identity?

It says "IBM" in the name so I'm actually often reminded of the company via seeing the font in the wild.

And somehow they did seem to capture a distinctive IBM vibe when designing it, whilst still making it general enough to be used by everyone else

That's why I love the Readex Pro font. It also has glyphs for Arabic and a lot more languages in the same file, so I can use one font file for everything.

Depending on your phone manufacturer, zFont 3 has been solid for me for setting system wide fonts.

I have Iosevka for everything I can set a custom font to.

Plex Monospace is great for coding as well.

yes. zed has a fork too https://github.com/zed-industries/zed-fonts

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