How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#2What's the best way to use web fonts on a site that needs to be internationalized.
I realize that not all web fonts support all languages but picking between the best ones and then supporting all the languages seems like a pain.
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#3Is it just me or does Inter look like a clone of Helvetica?
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#4What's the best way to use web fonts on a site that needs to be internationalized. I realize that not all web fonts support all languages but picking between the best ones and then supporting all the languages seems like a pain.
Google's Noto fonts[0][1] will give you good coverage. You should still do some basic smoke testing when launching a new language for your site though.
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#5Is it just me or does Inter look like a clone of Helvetica?
It started as a clone of Roboto, which in turn started as a clone of Helvetica (sort of), so that's not really a surprising reaction. Fonts are weird like that.
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#6> With a typeface, it's just this black box as to who is using some of the stuff, then you have no way of reaching back. You're completely reliant on whoever makes use of it tells you about it, which probably no one does, right?
I've seen multiple websites (What The Font being one of them) which analyses a picture with text. They then try to guess the font being used. If you could automate this process, you might be able to scrape content and figure out who's using your typeface. I guess that is mostly interesting for a commercial typeface looking for software piracy, though.
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#7What's the best way to use web fonts on a site that needs to be internationalized. I realize that not all web fonts support all languages but picking between the best ones and then supporting all the languages seems like a pain.
The usual advice is that you make sure you have plenty of font fallback options that may already be on the user's machine, and why most CSS font-family snippets always end in a wide, generic display class such as "serif" and "sans-serif".
In general, it's hard to break browser fallback to system fonts for languages/glyphs that aren't available. (Though people will sometimes try, or make crazy bad accidents happen.)
But, you mostly only have to worry about languages your webpage is outputting anyway. If you aren't localizing to a particular language and you don't allow user content, you don't have to worry about a web font covering those glyphs. Which is why most web fonts only worry about the top few languages for download speed optimization.
Google Fonts has tools to be smarter about which subsets are downloaded in a browser. It has a subset hint where you can tell it languages you think you will need. Google Fonts also supports the use of the unicode-range CSS feature [0] to tell a browser to download subsets only if the browser encounters characters in the associated Unicode ranges.
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#8Am I the only one that wishes the article about the font "made for screens" went into more detail about what makes this specific font better for screens?
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#9Am I the only one that wishes the article about the font "made for screens" went into more detail about what makes this specific font better for screens?
I'd imagine they didn't because it was more about the timeline and process of creating it? They did touch on briefly about why he wanted to create it.
> We'd used Roboto as our main font, and we were running up against its limitations. It was originally built to work as both a display typeface for things like titles and text typeface for longer blocks of text like paragraphs. But it was difficult to read Roboto when it was small
Emphasis mine
Re: How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be
#10Is it just me or does Inter look like a clone of Helvetica?
It's not just you... I think it reminds us of Helvetica because it borrows some common elements from Helvetica that are frequently changed in other Helvetica-like faces. For example, the ascender on the lowercase "t" is horizontal, unlike Arial. The apertures are also relatively tight, like Helvetica, and the x-heights are similar. I wouldn't say it's a clone though; it manages to look a little more humanist without being whimsical, which IMHO is a real accomplishment for a designer's first typeface.