Apple introduces new font: “San Francisco.” Shoulda been called “Francisco Sans.“

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Wasn’t one of the original Mac fonts San Francisco?

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Totally agree on the shoulda been name. They missed a fun word play opportunity.

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Yep. Perfect for ransom notes.

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They think we don’t remember.

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So. What.

Google did Roboto, Microsoft has released countless fonts (including some good monospaced IDE programming fonts) … but is it news worthy? Is it Boingboing worthy?

No.

This is merely yet another company releasing a font to ‘create unity within their platform’.

I’m sorry, but I’ll go to a specialised Apple/mobile/tablet site for this news if it were to interest me. I don’t go to Boingboing for this kind of non-news/hey-look-at-this-mildly-interesting-thing-apple-paid-us-to-showcase-news.

Up your game, guys!

Seems you do, and you even get to make insinuations about it after!

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i’m just waiting for someone to post a screenshot of the OS using the original one.

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I don’t like the font. Not sure why. The F looks 1 nth too tall, and the S is about an nth too wide.

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Font shmont…I’m totally naming my next RPG PC “Francisco Sans”.

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Eh, at least it’s tech news, however bland. Better this than more robo-posted ad copy for products they don’t even bother to review anymore, presented as actual content.

Hey, @AcerPlatanoides, good news! My standards are getting lower!

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Even better, I’m sure someone at Apple must have suggested Sans Francisco.
It would even be pronounced like San Francisco by those of us who stayed awake during French lessons.
But no, I’m sure the marketing department blanded it all down.

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That was before gentrification really took hold.

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I’m biased against Sans-serif fonts generally, because they’re harder for me to read. And also I like being able to distinguish “l” from “I” and “O” from “0” and “nn” from “m” from “rn” (the “rn” looking exactly like “m” frusterates the hell out of me, and it even happens on BoingBoing. I’ve been looking for a custom stylesheets addon for Firefox, but I can’t find one that actually works.)

Anyway, as far as this font goes, I feel like the lines in it are far too narrow. I’m trying to imagine using it on a screen the size of an Apple Watch, and with Apple’s tendency to use gray text instead of black text, I would expect it to be miniscule, tall, and illegible.

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because they’re harder for me to read.

I’ve heard that this is a MYTH, and you should be ashamed of yourself for letting your subjective aesthetic biases color your perception of the world.

I wonder if it renders well on low resolution screens–I found Helvetica Neue to be be inferior to Lucida Grande.

For an older example of “Apple changes typefaces; world amazed”, take a look at this article on Yosemite…

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I don’t know if this is sarcasm or not, but indeed it is harder for me to read sans-serif typefaces than serif. I did timed document reading and everything.

Also, how the fuck is it supposed to not be harder to read a font where some of the glyphs are indistinguishable? Sure you can know what they are from context, but that takes extra cycles, and the whole point of text in the first place it to efficiently store and transmit ideas. If a font makes it in any way harder to read, then it’s failed at it’s most important task.

Excellent News Grasshopper!

Ah yea. The old Francisco Con, with ser(i)fs.

Pretty sure Roboto made a few headlines when it was released, and I recall the most recent new Windows fonts also landing some ‘front page’ coverage online.

Boing Boing covered Roboto, too: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/roboto.html

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Yes, but… uh… Apple just invented the font! Watch Android copy Apple now by using a font, too…

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