Did a little research on how other design systems serve fonts. Solid assumes you have two fonts available on your app and then gives instructions for how to get them. Others (Polaris, Salesforce LDS, Trello) do not mention specifically how to get them. Gov.uk seems to serve them from within the system but I can't figure out all the specifics of how it works.

Since InterUI is open source, I'm leaning towards the first option: writing documentation for how to install it on a project rather than including it within Primer.

Any suggestions @primer/ds-core?

Just my two cents:

Inter UI doesn't support a monospace font I think, and it's a little weird how Rasmus's website is displaying and styling the typeface itself:

There isn't a differentiation between display and body text for Inter-UI, and I believe the designer is doing it manually through the styling

Apple's -apple-system auto corrects between SF Pro Display and SF Pro Text, I think:
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/visual-design/typography/

I think Inter-UI might be a headache for teams to go in manually to declare styling... but there could be information I'm missing!

Hey @jhuashao - thanks for your comment!

Inter UI doesn't support a monospace font I think / There isn't a differentiation between display and body text for Inter-UI

Luckily, we're only using Inter for headings (and only on Marketing sites). Body copy on any marketing site will use the system font stack that is used on the rest of GitHub. Same thing goes for mono, so we aren't defining anything special for marketing sites and it can match with the product.

My biggest question at the moment is what is the best approach for installing the font files. I personally think it would be best to link directly to https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/tag/v3.0 and providing documentation, but I agree that this manual approach could be a headache!

My biggest question at the moment is what is the best approach for installing the font files. I personally think it would be best to link directly to https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/tag/v3.0 and providing documentation, but I agree that this manual approach could be a headache!

I agree, and I think that we should at least consider distributing all of the web-ready files (.eot, .woff, etc.) necessary to display it. Otherwise people are just going to hack around and end up posting TrueType and OTF versions to FontSquirrel or whatever. 😱

just wanted to leave a note here that there are still some alt- classes used in github/github so we should double check that is updated before this is merged in

as well as probably a handful of subdomains that are using them too, e.g. Partners site

i have some spare time between projects and will open a PR shortly to update in github/github!

Hi friends! Drive-by lurker here. 👋

I'm curious what prompted the decision to replace Roboto with InterUI.

I just added the font files to this PR!

@shawnbot has written an awesome sync tool https://github.com/primer/sync#readme that will move all scss from node_modules over to _sass so we can surface and use the css/font files from primer in our jekyll sites cc/ @primer/github-site-design

I think that wraps up all thats needed for this PR! if we can get another review/sanity check please 👀

Okay, so here's the catch with primer-sync: it only does the SCSS files (**/*.scss). However, it should be pretty straightforward making it support font files (**/*.woff, right?).

Okay, I'm going to test this out with primer-sync once the change in 1a7850c gets published. 🤞

Hey @zeke

I'm curious what prompted the decision to replace Roboto with InterUI.

Sorry to not respond sooner! I think the main driver for us to switch was mostly based on the visual design of InterUI and how it went well with with our new marketing site design direction. We also introduced a new monospaced font in our marketing design as well (SF Mono) and needed a display/header type that would work well with it; Roboto didnt fit the tone/personality we were going for anymore. We landed on Inter UI as it paired well with everything and is also open source and free, which is important to our heavily trafficked sites. :)

Hopefully I didnt leave any other more important reason for our switch unaccounted for cc/ @primer/github-site-design if i missed anything!

Quick follow-up: primer-sync does copy .woff files now, but it puts them in the same place as all of the .scss files. That needs more work, but it shouldn't block this PR. Let's merge this into #498. 🚀