Apple unveiled an expanded model of its San Francisco system font at WWDC 2022. Then, final month, Jim Nielsen zeroed in on the font’s variations, explaining how the font gives a spectrum of variations primarily based on the width and weight. It’s a outstanding learn when you haven’t checked it.
With all of those nice new choices, you may be tempted to make use of them in an internet design. Chris was ogling over the expanded units as nicely over on his private weblog and contemplated:
But it surely’s not 12 months clear how we’d faucet into the condensed, compressed, and expanded varieties in CSS, or if there’s even a plan to permit that. I suppose we are able to peek round Apple.com finally and see how they do it if they begin utilizing them there.
Doesn’t this make excellent sense to assemble as a variable font and ship the entire package and kaboodle that method?
Seems, sure. It does make excellent sense. Chris follows up in a new submit:
However simply yesterday I randomly stumbled throughout the truth that the built-in San Francisco font (on the Apple units which have it built-in) is already variable (!!). See, I used to be derping round with Roboto Flex, and had system-ui because the fallback font, and I used to be noticing that in the course of the FOUT, the font-variation-settings I used to be utilizing had an impact on the fallback font, which renders as San Francisco on my Mac. Which… until I’m daft… signifies that San Francisco is a variable font.
So, as for utilizing it? Chris has a demo, in fact:
There are some gotchas to all this, probably the most vital being fallbacks for non-Apple units. In spite of everything, that demo is solely calling system-ui for the font household — it’s not telling the browser to obtain a font file or something and who is aware of if Apple is gonna ever ship a variable font file we are able to serve up as an precise customized net font.
The opposite fascinating factor? Chris did some sleuthing and counted 35 format featured included in that system font. Go learn the remainder of the submit to see ’em all (and to get a great ol’ dose of Chris-isms — I do know I miss them!).
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