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0 pointsemchammer1y ago0 comments

Wow, is Inter ever a beautiful typeface. A rare find when there seemed to be a glut of corporate NIH typefaces for a while.

macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin character sets, to the fluent readers of those languages.

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giraffe_lady1y ago

The number of fonts that include even two good alphabets is pretty low. I have run into needing english and greek or cyrillic in the same document. I know of like three good fonts that have a good english and a good greek. My eye isn't as practiced at looking at cyrillic fonts but it seems even rarer for that combination.

Which honestly makes sense and there may not be a solution for. Different alphabets and writing systems have their own typographical histories and conventions. It's reasonable that there is a very limited design space where you're adhering to the conventions of two separate systems as well as maintaining interior consistency.

thefringthing1y ago

English is a language, Cyrillic is an alphabet, and Greek is both. The alphabet one finds in the range U+0000 to U+007F is called "Latin", not "English". If any alphabet has a claim on being "English", it's Shavian. (Found at U+10450 to U+1047F.)

jfdjkfdhjds1y ago

thats the kind of nitpick that got us where we are today :)

if you're talking with users, you assume alphabets and map from the languages.

nativeit1y ago

Inter quickly became my go-to sans serif font for the web. In A/B tests it somehow always looks better than anything, frequently by wide margins—which is saying something when you’re basically running through a dozen variations on Helvetica.

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