> Apple’s typeface lacks two things that any typeface (to a different extend) needs: Personality and purpose.
The 1. in San Francisco seems to have plenty of personality to me, and while there's not a lot of examples on the page and I think I'd need to see more, it doesn't seem like FF has particularly more personality.
From the rest of the article it seems like purpose = legibility in the context of UI. I wouldn't disagree that it's hard to distinguish I and L, but using German location signboards as an example seems wrong - iOS is not dealing with German locations for the most part. Is SF particularly bad for German?
For an article that aims to lay down conclusive arguments for why one font face is better, with the authority of someone who has studied fonts in school for four years, I'm not quite convinced...
Pretty much every other font which included a Capital Sharp S uses a shape which is more similar to the lowercase ß – and there were over time a lot of variation proposed:
For non German speakers: There exists an orthographic rule in German to render the lowercase ß as SS in uppercase in low fidelity environments and sometimes also for line breaks. For some reason English speakers sometimes interpret „ß“ and „ss“ as interchangeable, which is somewhat wrong. But I can see how an English speaking monolinguist tries to optimise things.
Most of the time that orthographic rule works. But it is after all a low fidelity variant, similar how the ü → ue pattern loses some information. To always use an SS ligature robs the reader of discrimination: Is „MASSE“ an uppercase variant of „Masse“ or of „Maße“? That’s particular significant for personal names which should be written exact, even in uppercase. There are reasons why typography introduced an „ẞ“, it then got encoded into Unicode - it fills a small need.
Apple had this wrong glyph in San Francisco from Mac OS El Capitan up until Mojave and elsewhere, including its web sites. It was rather absurd to report this bug to Apple: Radar/Feedback dialogue wasn’t really equipped to report a font bug and secondly both the Feedback reporter and Apple’s developer website used San Francisco at its font, making illustrating the report with glyphs rather annoying. And of course, as usual with bug reports to Apple: You’ll never get feedback.
Oh! I might know a little bit about this because I stumbled over something similar.
So you can transform text with CSS to be upper case (text-transform: uppercase). It turns ß to a double-S glyph as well in all browsers! Firefox now has a feature flag for it (layout.css.text-transform.uppercase-eszett.enabled). Why: Because unicode still defines it though in casing guidelines:
> # The German es-zed is special--the normal mapping is to SS.
> # Note: the titlecase should never occur in practice. It is equal to > titlecase(uppercase(<es-zed>))
And given that ẞ only made it into German orthography in 2017 and San Francisco is release in 2014 and Mojave only 2018, I don't think it is that big of a mess-up. That they only supported it after. I bet there are loads of fonts that still don't support the character and having double-S is better than nothing.
Edit to the Edit: Even the DIN 1451 doesn't support uppercase ẞ and e.g. the popular FF DIN (which San Francisco seems to be based on) is turning ẞ into double-S.
> And given that ẞ only made it into German orthography in 2017
As a character it was proposed first in 2004 and encoded in 2007.
> I bet there are loads of fonts that still don't support the character and having double-S is better than nothing.
Oh yes, of course. But those then don’t display „SS“ instead of „ẞ“ but either a missing glyph or a glyph from a fallback font.
> Edit: Kind of proud how I am using css-transforms and a few more CSS hacks to get it working on my mom's website in the title: https://gutshaeuser-ostpreussen.de/gutshaus
That’s a nice hack! Congratulations.
(gutshäuser-ostpreußen.de or rather xn--gutshuser-ostpreuen-1tb6g.de is still free, if you’ll want a new challenge. But I advise against using an IDNA domain with an „ß“ for e-mail. Evergreen browser are now updated for the IDNA2008 algorithm, which supports the „ß“, but for a long time first IDNA2003 didn’t support „ß“ in internationalised domains, then browser didn’t update to IDNA2008 until late in 201x. And other internet software like mail clients are even more behind. Sadly.)
There is an old proposal for the CSS WG floating around to enable custom alterations for text-transform or even custom transformations, since it is useful in other languages. That then would be a non-hacky way:
The german signboard was a good real-world example that I happened to see for myself, that’s why I included it. It is a perfectly fine example of the sort of phenomenon I was talking about. The fact that this particular example was a signboard doesn’t alter the fact, that the same applies for buttons on user interfaces for example. On the Macintosh Prototype, there was apparently a “Do It” button that some test users read as “Dolt” (idiot), so it was changed to “OK”.
I also didn’t “study fonts in school”, I’m a typographer. And if my arguments are not enough to convince you, you can look at what others said: https://x.com/espiekermann/status/1775993252736372738
The typeface is also used in Apple Maps, so it’s not such a bad example, even if that point wasn’t clearly made. iOS is also localized to a large number of languages, including German, so working well with other languages is also an important feature.
But I agree that it would be nice with an example from the UI where it’s actually a problem.
I use all kind of german localized apple operating systems for extended periods of time daily and never ever had any problem with legibility of the interface.
I would like to see a real example (not a constructed one like "Illiad" in the article) where the legibility is restricted.
When creating or testing typefaces, you always go with things like “1. Illiad” to compare one with another. If during this test, one is clearly the winner – like Unit (or something like Unit) is over SF Pro, then you don’t need real world tests. If your soup is way too salty in the kitchen, it will be the same in the dining hall. It’s really not rocket science.
The 1. in San Francisco seems to have plenty of personality to me, and while there's not a lot of examples on the page and I think I'd need to see more, it doesn't seem like FF has particularly more personality.
From the rest of the article it seems like purpose = legibility in the context of UI. I wouldn't disagree that it's hard to distinguish I and L, but using German location signboards as an example seems wrong - iOS is not dealing with German locations for the most part. Is SF particularly bad for German?
For an article that aims to lay down conclusive arguments for why one font face is better, with the authority of someone who has studied fonts in school for four years, I'm not quite convinced...