Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/02/inter-ui.html
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That font looks pretty bad to me.
Just in the first sentence, the space between the ‘T’ and the ‘h’ in the word ‘The’ is too big. Same goes for the space between the ‘(’ and the ‘U’. The apostrophe looks more like a foot mark. And what’s with the different dashes between human-computer and decision-making?
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It is. He’s typed his samples with the wrong character.
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No. Any Sans Serif font that doesn’t differentiate between I and l (Capital i and lowercase L) simply can’t claim “high legibility”.
And I know someone will say “Oh but they are different”. Can’t you see that the l is 1 pixel shorter and the the I is 1/2 a pixel wider? If you call that legible you are an ass. Text is meant to be read, not puzzled over.
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Most typeface legibility is based on reader familiarity. The brain gets better and better at recognizing what is put in front of it most often.
That’s why all of Germany could comfortably read dense blackletter for generations (while considering it the height of legibility).
That’s also why most conversations about optimizing legibility break down into useless anecdote-trading. Everyone is correct that their most commonly used font is super readable.
A new style can catch on, but people base a lot of their “I like it” on how much it fits in with what their brain has been conditioned to look for, over their reading life in this era.
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Imma just leave this here:
Lucida, from 1984, was designed for low resolution and small font readability. Bigelow won a MacArthur grant for his work in this area. I suppose each generation feels they need to reinvent everything.
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Right. They should all be hyphens and not em- or en-dashes.
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No, an en-dash for 'human–computer interaction" would be allowable here; it’s not a compound term.
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It does distinguish, but you have to use the alternate opentype feature to do it.
I’ve downloaded the typeface, and I’m still not seeing any differences in the OpenType fonts. Maybe my viewer isn’t rendering it correctly, but I only see straight verticals for both. All of the website’s samples show the same vertical stroke. The difference is maybe a pixel between them.
This is sample from LibreOffice using Inter UI Medium OTF. What or who is dangerous?
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And hyphethetically we should be able to enbiggen it, amirite?
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Eww. You can see the antialiasing.
Look down to where it explains:
Stylistic set 2: Disambiguation
Do we have to do all the work for you?
Well yes, that would be nice, but no. I see it now.
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No monospace version? How am I supposed to code with a 4 point font just like God intended?
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