Inter

A hyphen in Inter does not always sit at the same height. With contextual alternates switched on, punctuation shifts to suit the letters around it, so a dash between 2 capitals rides higher than one between lowercase, and the colon in a time like 10:45 lines up with the digits. Rasmus Andersson, a Swedish software maker living in San Francisco, built the family for computer screens before anything else, and those small corrections are what a screen at 13 px makes visible.

Most of the other choices follow from the screen too. The x-height is tall, to help mixed case and all lowercase text at the sizes an app uses. There is a slashed zero for anywhere a 0 could be taken for an o, a serial number or a voucher code. Tabular figures keep a column of prices from wobbling.

What is in the family

2,849 characters in each of 18 styles, Thin to Black with an italic for every weight, covering Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese, with 8 stylistic sets to rummage through. The italics take up the same width as the romans, near enough to the letter.

Google added it in January 2020. We would not choose it for a novel, the evenness that keeps a dashboard calm makes a long page feel flat after a while. For anything with buttons on it, though, it is hard to beat.