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The Interface font family

rsms.me

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: The Interface font family

#74

Looking at Interface's glyph map, I see that letter-O (O) is slightly wider than number-zero (0). Capital-eye (I) is indistinguishable from small-ell (l), though number-one (1) is distinguishable from both. What other glyph ambiguities do you look out for on new fonts?

Slashed 0 and Ø in nordic countries. Though not abiguous in sharing the exact same shapes, many characters can share similar structures that (arguably; citation needed) can cause visual confusion. For example; 3 and 8 in a typeface like Helvetica are very similar. Opening the aperture of the 3 or using a form with a corner in the upper right can be observed in some UI typefaces. The "single story a" can be an issue i…

[deleted]

Re: The Interface font family

#75

A disproportionate sans serif without any letter spacing. It's free though, so better than nothing. Edit: Dear downvoters, what I am saying is that you can take any ramdom sans serif, reduce the letter-spacing and you end up with a similar looking font face which might be even more balanced. Despite my criticism, I expressed my high appreciation that the creator offers his work for free. If you disagree let me know w…

What platform/browser are you using? It looks great on iOS, feels similar to San Francisco.

Re: The Interface font family

#76

Dear font authors: Please screenshot renderings via multiple important renderer, important ex: Apple Safari on a Retina box (highlights weird over-bolding due to their hinting prefs), Chrome and Firefox on Windows (both use Freetype, but custom builds and don't quite match stock), and anything normal on a Linux that doesn't use a hacked up Freetype (ergo Ubuntu is out, so is RHEL/Centos and Fedora). Also, in both whi…

Screen shot renderings? How about just dogfooding the font so one can see how it actually performs.

Try viewing source on the site before deeming my comment as noise:

https://rsms.me/interface/res/sample.png

Re: The Interface font family

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello Jack. I'm the creator of Interface. Indeed many glyphs's outlines comes from Roboto (though fitted into different glyph boxes.) The "playground" feature of the website even has a feature for comparing Interface with Roboto. When you do, and you look at the details, you'll find that Interface is actually quite different from Roboto, at least as far as "different" goes with utilitarian UI fonts. https://rsms.me/i…

Hi Rasmus, I think that at the point size at which this is meant to be used—e.g. around 11px ( https://rsms.me/interface/lab/?size=11&compare=roboto ) —the differences between the two become harder to distinguish. The issue is really that the character of the type is going to be dictated by the systematic decisions: stroke weight, x-height, proportion, spacing. Starting from Roboto and not changing these parameters i…

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Re: The Interface font family

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Rasmus, I think that at the point size at which this is meant to be used—e.g. around 11px ( https://rsms.me/interface/lab/?size=11&compare=roboto ) —the differences between the two become harder to distinguish. The issue is really that the character of the type is going to be dictated by the systematic decisions: stroke weight, x-height, proportion, spacing. Starting from Roboto and not changing these parameters i…

FWIW, I do find Interface to be subjectively noticeably more pleasant than Roboto in the comparison here.

Also subjective, but at that size on my machine (13" MBA, non-Retina, El Capitan, Chrome), I find Roboto is a lot easier to read. Interface looks 'greyer' and the contrast isn't so good.

Re: The Interface font family

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything normal on a Linux that doesn't use a hacked up Freetype (ergo Ubuntu is out, so is RHEL/Centos and Fedora). Your definition of "normal", "important" Linux _excludes_ Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, and Fedora? I get your point about hacked up FreeType, but given that the three largest distributions on the planet are excluded from your list doesn't really gel.

Aren't the FreeType patches less relevant now since the new v40 interpreter[1] was released? [1]: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.htm...

Ubuntu is still much better out the box than Fedora (though it's a simple fix with freetype-freeworld) on none-HiDPI screens - though it's subjective obviously.

Re: The Interface font family

#80

Sadly, digits have a different width, so if you have e.g. a right-aligned, increasing numerical value in your UI, the left digit of it will "wiggle around" if the last digit iterates through 0-9, and if you have numerical values, they won't align. This may be OK for text, but specifically for user interfaces, this is the very first thing I check when considering whether a font is usable. With a good font, it will be…

Normally this is done with "tabular numbers", an alternate set of glyphs in the font where all digit glyphs is equally wide. However, another feature a font can provide is "proportional numbers"—the inverse of tabular numbers. Most fonts usually provide one or the other. Roboto for instance provides "proportional numbers" as an option, and uses tabular numbers by default. Interface by contrast uses proportional numbe…

Tabular numbers added and will be included in the next release (1.2) https://github.com/rsms/interface/issues/10#issuecomment-324...
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