Inter is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens.
The family features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.
After downloading the zip from above:
Inter is similar to Roboto, San Francisco, Akkurat, Asap, Lucida Grande and other "UI" and "Text" typefaces. Some trade-offs were made in order to make this typeface work really well at small sizes:
Current font styles:
Name Weight class Thin 100 Thin Italic 100 Extra Light 200 Extra Light Italic 200 Light 300 Light Italic 300 Regular 400 Italic 400 Medium 500 Medium Italic 500 Semi Bold 600 Semi Bold Italic 600 Bold 700 Bold Italic 700 Extra Bold 800 Extra Bold Italic 800 Black 900 Black Italic 900Inter also ships as a variable font.
This font was originally designed to work at a specific size: 11px. Thus, the Units per EM (UPM) is defined in such a way that a power-of-two multiple of one EM unit ends up at an integer value compared to a pixel. Most fonts are designed with a UPM of either 1000 or 2048. Because of this we picked a value that is as high as possible but also as close as possible to one of those common values (since it's reasonable to assume that some layout engines and rasterizers are optimized for those value magnitudes.) We ended up picking a UPM of 2816 which equates to exactly 256 units per pixel when rasterized for size 11pt at 1x scale. This also means that when rasterized at power-of-two scales (like 2x and 4x) the number of EM units corresponding to a pixel is an integer (128 units for 2x, 64 for 4x, and so on.)
However, as the project progressed and the typeface was put into use, it quickly became clear that for anything longer than a short word, it was actually hard to read the almost monotonically-spaced letters.
A second major revision was created where the previously-strict rule of geometry being even multiples of 256 was relaxed and now the rule is "try to stick with 128x, if you can't, stick with 64x and if you can't do that either, never go below 16x." This means that Inter is now much more variable in pace than it used to be, making it work better at higher resolutions and work much better in longer text, but losing some contrast and sharpness at small sizes.
The glyphs are designed based on this "plan"; most stems and lines will be positioned at EM units that are even multiples of 128, and in a few cases they are at even multiples of 64 or as low as 16.
Metrics:
Translating between EM units and pixels:
There's a Figma workspace for glyphs, with configured metrics: "Inter glyphs"
For instructions on how to work with the source files and how to compile & build font files, refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.
Inter is licensed under the SIL Open Font License
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