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Comment by smarx007 | Hacker News Reader

IBM Plex is very good. Recently, I have been enjoying https://rsms.me/inter/ for interfaces a bit more (with ss02 for body and ss02+tnum for tables activated).

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Inter is the only libre typeface that has good coverage, and produces readable small text on terrible 80 DPI displays. I've tested probably hundreds of them.

But l and I (ell and eye) are identical in Inter.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter?preview.text=lllll%2...

I never understood why a font designer would ever choose to do that. There should be an ironclad rule that different letters must look different.

You did not check my link and ss02 out, did you?

Then tell me where to download that ss02 and install on PC for docx file and set default in browser?

Hasn't Inter been the default tech font for the last 5 years or so by virtue of being the default font in Figma? The Times New Roman of UI.

Oh, is that why everyone uses it? I just assumed people wanted knockoff San Francisco on purpose

I think you have it the other way around.

It's not used because it's the default font in Figma.

It's the fact that it's the best modern alternative to Helvetica, making it universally useful and therefore the default in Figma.

Incidentally, I'll forever mourn that the designers didn't choose to go with a glyph for "1" that is closer to the one in Helvetica.

Inter is the default in Figma because the first designer at Figma was the guy who created it.

Huh, TIL. Thank you!

I guess I can try to argue that it if it weren't as generally useful as Helvetica it wouldn't have been made the default in Figma and it wouldn't be, well, so generally used.

Hah, this one can go on Wikipedia as an example for "chicken or the egg"! IMO, there's probably a number of other fonts that could've been chosen rather than Inter as default Figma font, and if they had been, they'd now be more ubiquitous than Inter. Of course, we'll never know. Unless someone here is looking to do a research study into popularity of fonts over time compared to popularity of Figma and seeing how strong the correlation is - maybe a weekend project for someone into typography ;)

Ah, it initially appeared that the capital I and the lowercase L have identical-looking glyphs. But scrolling down, I see the ss02 and tnum features add noticeable glyphs. Looks like a nice typeface.

Inter has also become my default.

Nice. Inter even has "U+1E9E" "Latin Capital Letter Sharp S" and two lower case sharp s variants as well.

Is U+1E9E used for anything besides ALLCAPS text?

Probably not.

Inter or linter?

Feature ss02 Disambiguation (one of many)

Alternate glyph set that increases visual difference between similar-looking characters.

Why isn't it the default? :( I'm rarely in control of how a font is used.

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