Google Releases Its New Google Sans Flex Font as Open Source

If you like variable fonts, no font is better at giving fine tune control than Roboto Flex (also by Google).

Has 12-axis of variables (whereas most only have 1 or 2)

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex/tester

yep. specially since Apple font license is quite restrictive:

> Apple restricts the usage of the typeface by others. It is licensed to registered third-party developers only for the design and development of applications for Apple's platforms. Only SF Pro, SF Compact, SF Mono, SF Arabic, SF Hebrew and New York variants are available for download on Developer website and they are the only SF variants allowed to be used by developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(sans-serif_type...

Oh man, I already spend way too much time stressing about size & weight. This is enough toggles to let you really spend hours trying to get it perfect!

And it's quite cool (and uncommon, in my experience with variable fonts) they're adding a control for roundness

That’s a lowercase “L” vs. uppercase “I” for those of you as confused as I was.

Almost no fonts do this by default and instead offer it as context alternate, but I feel a font should always use a dashed or preferably dotted zero. Zero being slightly skinnier than capital O is not enough for rapid visual clarity.

One would think that this would be a fundamental principle in font design, distinguishing letters from each other.

> I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I.

Serif fonts solved this problem generations ago.

I had a manager who preferred monospaced font, it definitely made it easier in a lot of cases. I also notice a number of them make i l and I and 1 distinct enough.

monofur - my monospaced programming font of choice for decades now has an almost psychotic dedication to glyph disambiguation, every character is exceedingly distinct.

Lately I’ve become a fan of:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible

Mainly for its attention to detail. It’s careful to make it obvious when it matters. For example, O and 0, lower case L and 1, and others.

I also agree with you on the O0 I'll distinctions importance. So as google open-source it, someone can improved it freely.

One of the few unqualified improvements that “X” (aka Twitter) made was rendering the usernames in a font that has wings for the lowercase L

This is an Interface font, most suited for User Interfaces (Websites, Apps, etc). Almost all fonts that I have seen that distinguish the “O0 & Il” properly do not look good when used as an Interface font, but look good as an editor or something you do with it (Notes).

For instance, I set Inter[1] as my UI font in Obsidian, but I have set “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next”[2] as my Editor Font. I would gladly use such clean sans-serif fonts (Inter, Flex Sans, Geist, etc.)[3] because they are easy for the human eye to read quickly, even if there is a spelling error, and hence the distinction between the “O0 & Il” would not matter.

So, It Depends on the use case. “Atkinson Hyperlegible Next” is a fantastic, highly readable/recognizable font, but it will look pretty ugly when using it to design interfaces.

1. https://rsms.me/inter/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible

3. https://vercel.com/font

> stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I

Strongly agree on this, Bitwarden previously used a font that made passwords that contains i (or was it I?) and l difficult to distinguish.

Not only must the il1 O0 series be distinguishable, but they need to stand on their own. If I only see one in isolation, can I know if that it must be a capital O and not a zero?

> Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why?

I think the right answer here is to avoid including 1/I/l/O/0 in your tokens. For example, I'm pretty sure that Nintendo gift card codes can't contain those characters?

It seems like such poor design to make those letters indistinguishable from each other.

For me it comes up often as names of people or places, because those are more likely to be in a font that doesn’t distinguish and also there is no additional redundancy

When I was in Italy, it took me far too long to realize on Google Maps that all the restaurants I was visiting started with "Il" and not the roman numeral two "II"

Indeed, and you'd think that over many decades of font design some basic fails like this would not happen as they'd be against the fundamental rules "that every single font designer knows by heart"

If the font doesn't support ligatures, it might as well be generated by AI ;-P

Many fonts have a disambiguation option. Inter by default doesn't pass the I test - but it can be enabled.

Google Flex Sans supports font-feature-settings: "zero" - but doesn't seem to support lower-case l, upper-case I disambiguation.

I wonder why the Ubuntu and the IBM Plex Sans fonts use a different style "a" for italic vs non-italic. I like the Ubuntu font and have used it in the past.

Hello fellow Ubuntu font lover.

I have this set as my OS default and also forced for all webpages, I just find it so clear and easy to read. On the occasion that I have to browse the web without it, I don't struggle per-say, but I definitely find that I have to read slower, and find myself rereading words more often.

I don't really like serif fonts, but the two that immediately come to mind are Noto Serif and IBM Plex Serif. Both are open source. I know Noto Serif is variable, but not sure about IBM Plex.

I am very fond of Merriweather (which I recently saw on a list of over-used fonts, for those who believe that you should use a different obscure and, hopefully, hard to read font in every document). It pairs nicely with Merriweather Sans, Cascadia Code, and for math Libertinus Modern, though I do have to tweak ex-heights to match.

Lots! Start with the Google Fonts browser. This link should take you directly to a variable + serif list, and from there you can drill down into sub-styles, focus more on those with more axis, more styles, etc.: https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Technology:%2FTech...

Inter is pretty great.

The round variant looks like a fatty lacking warrior ethos. Unsuitable for Department of War. /s

I assume this is a shot at the White House but announcing an "anti-racist font" is totally up Google's alley

I know I've seen Mozilla proudly pat themselves on the back in their announcement of anti-racist Firefox themes

It seems it is actively anti-DEI: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Flex?preview.t...

1 too: https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=i1IlL0Oo

My favorite coding font: Iosevka Term.

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

It takes a day or so to get used to the condensed form factor, but after that you can enjoy much more horizontal space in your terminal windows.

There is one downside: all the other fonts will look bulky :)

heh, Im using this font in my game. Picking fonts is hard, and I feel like I've just dipped my toe in the water so far. Im not 100% satisfied with the non-monospace font I use (Adobe Source Sans), but I have more important things to focus on right now

Google Sans isn't a coding font though.

I also prefer JetBrains Mono.

While there are a few other programming fonts with a very similar quality, for myself JetBrains Mono has a distinctive advantage: it includes a much greater character set than any other good programming font that I have ever tested (DejaVu Sans Mono also has a big character set, but it is definitely uglier), for instance it has a lot of mathematical symbols that I need.

There is also CodingFont if you want to do a tournament selection to find your preference.

https://www.codingfont.com/

Funny, that's my one of my least favorite monospace fonts. My favorite is PragmataPro. I love how the characters are compact yet very readable.

Thanks for sharing this!!

I like using silly fonts, e.g. Comic Sans Mono has been my daily driver for the past year or so, and it's really fun to see the Minecraft fonts and old DOS and VT323 fonts. If anyone's into retro computing, it's worth checking those out, particularly the website link for the IBM VGA 9x16, which has loads and loads more old fonts.

I think I'll try using Monocraft in the shell for a while and see if it works well for me, though I might stick to Comic Sans for actual coding :)

I agree with you, but this font is less notable for its glyph design than for the fact that you can obtain many variations of it by choosing suitable parameter values (hence the "Flex" name).

This is a feature that few, if any, open source typefaces possess.

Being open source, the same techniques can be reused in the design of another parametrized font, with less ambiguous glyphs.

Perhaps they are trying to improve the Gemini performance on https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ .

The earliest CRT terminals were round.

Letters with rounded terminals are especially popular for public signage in a few Asian countries, e.g. Japan and Korea.

That is why Microsoft Windows has included such a rounded font for the Korean script: Gulim. On Windows, if you want to render a text with Latin letters with rounded ends, you can use Gulim for the normal text, coupled with Arial Round for the bold text.

On MacOS, there was a Hiragino Maru Gothic rounded font for Japanese (where also the Latin letters are rounded). I no longer use Apple computers, so I do not know whether the Hiragino fonts have remained the fonts provided for Japanese.

According to Secretary of State, fonts can be woke now, so I guess?

Yes, it matters, and big companies can do fantastic things by designing extremely expansive fonts which make it easy to include users speaking plenty of languages that we developers don't even know about.

It makes a big difference for legibility which font you pick. But I see what you mean in that, if the font is "just fine" (not trying to be fancy or, say, in futuristic style for a game or something), then why bother making yet another "just fine" font as Google has done here? There's already so many sans-serif fonts that no person could tell apart if they don't see them directly side-by-side and are asked to spot the difference. For this reason, I also wonder why this release matters at all