from Hacker News

San Francisco system font replacement for Yosemite

by siong1987 on 11/19/14, 12:24 AM with 57 comments

  • by DigitalSea on 11/19/14, 1:27 AM

    I might not be in the majority, but I actually like the new system font Helvetica Neue. I am a huge fan of it and on a Retina Display it makes so much sense. Understandably those who do not have the luxury of a Retina Display, I can understand the frustration, but having said that, I think the whole system font change thing has been blown out of proportion.

    Even though I like Helvetica Neue, I really dig the new San Francisco font, it is a pretty nice alternative that seems to work pretty well for those who are using a non-Retina Display. If you want to bring back Lucida Grande, this Github repository has a handy script that will do that for you (some work colleagues of mine, designers mainly did it to bring back the old font): https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite

  • by gojomo on 11/19/14, 12:40 AM

    For Apple aficionados of a certain vintage, San Francisco will always be the 'ransom font' of the original Mac:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29

  • by bbx on 11/19/14, 1:48 AM

    Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones' opinion about Helvetica in Yosemite: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont...

    It echoes Erik Spiekermann's view as well: Helvetica wasn't designed for small sizes on screen.

    http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/

  • by yincrash on 11/19/14, 2:25 AM

    Isn't this against the license for the font? I thought that it was explicitly for the use of designing apple watch ui.

  • by fredsted on 11/19/14, 7:13 AM

    I was actually saddened when I saw people starting with their patches forcing Lucida back in OS X 10.10.

    Helvetica was one of the things that made the iPhone so great.

    Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read. It's the perfect user interface font, especially the UI-optimized version OS X 10.10 is using.

    As always, people just hate change.

    That said, San Fransisco is a cool font, it just looks horrible as a computer font: too much space, and it's almost like all the characters look the same. But for a small device like a watch it's perfect.

  • by mfkp on 11/19/14, 2:37 AM

    Looks like a straight up knockoff of Google's Roboto font: https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752

    Only big difference I can see is the 'Q'.

  • by mortenjorck on 11/19/14, 3:13 AM

    Eventually, I think it's quite likely that Apple will adopt San Francisco across all its operating systems, but that will only happen after a lot more behind-the-scenes typographic tweaking. It may look good enough as a drop-in replacement right now, but everything from stroke widths and hinting for non-retina displays to kerning tables and metrics within the interface will get some attention before anything other than the watch ships with these fonts.

  • by _dps on 11/19/14, 1:45 AM

    Does anyone know the licensing status of the TTFs?

  • by Jgrubb on 11/19/14, 12:44 AM

    I don't hate it, but I'd love to just have Lucida back.

  • by nwienert on 11/19/14, 2:43 AM

    In chrome 38 it messes up tabs text (they are set too low)

  • by bherms on 11/19/14, 1:20 AM

  • by 72deluxe on 11/19/14, 9:42 AM

    Does anyone here have a "low res" (like 1440x900) MacBook? I do - it's from 2012 and was the last to have a CD drive so that I could write CDs for bandmates, plus it has a dedicated Ethernet port instead of a mass of external adapters (useful for AVB testing).

    Anyway, since Yosemite the font for the menu bar has been a bit "bitty" and not smooth which contrasts sharply with the rest of the shininess seen everywhere - does this resolve this? I thought I'd ask before taking the plunge.

  • by fabrika on 11/19/14, 5:05 AM

    The font looks really fresh but it only has Latin glyphs, hopefully they will add Cyrillic and Asian range this winter.

  • by nnq on 11/19/14, 1:32 PM

    Am I the only one that thinks Segoe fonts from MS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe) would look much better than this for the original use (Apple Watch)?

  • by hit8run on 11/19/14, 2:29 AM

    I don't know what some designers today have with these ultra thin fonts. One can use thin font variants but only together with big font-sizes.

    Form follows function => Font Function = legibility => don't use too thin fonts in smaller sizes.

  • by emillon on 11/19/14, 10:00 AM

    > You must be a registered Apple Developer to use these fonts. Do not download if you don't have a paid Apple Developer Program account.

    I presume that this is against github's TOS.

  • by andy_ppp on 11/19/14, 12:19 PM

    Good god, I've installed it and what a mistake! The weight of the font seems to be very variable and the spacing between letters i s m a s s i v e.

    Uninstall sadly :-(

  • by tempodox on 11/19/14, 11:56 AM

    Almost nice, but the digit glyphs are destroyed: they're not equally wide any more. Sorry, but can't use a font like that.

  • by oliv__ on 11/19/14, 1:04 AM

    This looks really good. Sleek and friendly at the same time.

    I just wish there was a way to bring the old dock back, then I might upgrade.

  • by LastZactionHero on 11/19/14, 6:50 AM

    After looking over the Yosemite change logs, as a non-iPhone user, it looks like a new font was all I had to look forward to. Every other update seems to concern sharing content between the desktop and iOS devices.

    And now I'm finding out this new font- my only real reason for a 5GB update- is so unpopular that a hack to replace it is front page on HN.

  • by h3xe on 11/19/14, 9:34 AM

    So, Apple dedicate a cohort of designers to revitalize UI and what people do in return? They ruin all this by replacing system font with one from a goddamn 40mm watch.

    Disgraceful.

    As much as I don't like Yosemite (they really broke Spotlight), its UI is much better than that of previous versions.