
Inter – open source and legible typeface - stockkid
https://github.com/rsms/inter
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Cenk
Previously discussed (664 points, 92 comments):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784583)

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Theodores
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.

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petercooper
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/](https://rsms.me/inter/)

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wtmt
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)?

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beefhash
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/](https://adobe-
fonts.github.io/source-serif-pro/)

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

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

With Cinnamon on Fedora it's very pretty.

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dvh
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.

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Double_a_92
Yes, but the perfect font would still be perfect. Which could benefit people
that are not unbiased yet.

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imglorp
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?

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miloshadzic
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.

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michaelchris
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.

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andjd
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.

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

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

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

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

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WorldMaker
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.

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

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pizza
nice looking font

