Cantarell has been used as the default interface font since November 2010, but unfortunately, font technology is moving forward, while Cantarell isnʼt.
Similarly, Source Code Pro was used as the default monospace font, but its maintenance hasnʼt been well. Aesthetically, it has fallen out of taste too.
GNOME was ready to move on, which is why the Design Team has been putting effort into making the switch to different fonts in recent cycles.
The Sans
Inter was quite a straightforward choice, due to its modern design, active maintenance, and font feature support. It might be the most popular open source sans font, being used in Figma, GitLab, and many other places.
An issue was created to discuss the font. From this, a single design tweak was decided on: the lowercase L should be disambiguated.
A formal initiative was made for the broader community to try out the font, catch issues that had to be resolved, and look at the platform to see where we need to change anything in terms of visuals. Notably, the Shell lock screen got bolder text.
At this point, some issues started popping up, including some nasty Cantarell-specific hacks in Shell, and broken small caps in Software. These were quickly fixed thereafter, and due to GTKʼs robust font adaptivity, apps were mostly left untouched.
However, due to Interʼs aggressive use of calt, some unintended behavior arose in arbitrary strings as a result of ligatures. There were two fixes for this, but they would both add maintenance costs which is what weʼre trying to move away from:
- Subset the font to remove
caltentirely - Fork the font to remove the specific ligature that caused issues
This blocked the font from being the default in GNOME 47, as Rasmus, the Inter maintainer, was busy at the time, and the lack of contact brought some uncertainty into the Design Team. Luckily, when Rasmus returned during the 48 development cycle, he removed the problematic ligature and Inter was back in the race.
No further changes were required after this, and Inter, now as Adwaita Sans, was ready for GNOME 48.
The Mono
After the sans font was decided on as Inter, we wanted a matching monospace font. Our initial font selection consisted of popular monospace fonts and recommendations from Rasmus.
We also made a list of priorities, the new font would need:
- A style similar to Adwaita Sans
- Active maintenance
- Good legibility
- Large language coverage
Some fonts on our initial font selection fell off due to shortcomings in this list, and we were left with IBM Plex Mono, Commit Mono and Iosevka.
Just like for the sans font, we made a call for testing for these three fonts. The difference in monospace fonts can be quite hard to notice, so the non-visual benefits of the fonts were important.
The favorite among users was Commit Mono, due to its fairly close neutral design to Adwaita Sans. However, the font that we ended up with was Iosevka. This made some people upset, but this decision was made for a couple of reasons:
- Iosevka has more active maintenance
- Iosevkaʼs configuration might have the best free tooling out there
- When configured, Iosevka can look extremely similar to Adwaita Sans
- The language coverage of Iosevka is considerably larger
So, in the end, kramo and me went through all its glyphs, configured them to look as close to Adwaita Sans as possible, and made that Adwaita Mono.
Naming
We wanted unique names for the fonts, because it will allow us to more easily switch them out in the future if necessary. Only the underlying repository will have to change, nothing else.
The configured Inter was originally named GNOME UI Font, but due to the introduction of the monospace font and our design system being called Adwaita, we moved the fonts under its umbrella as Adwaita Fonts.
Technical Details
We use OpenType Feature Freezer to get the disambiguated lowercase L in Inter, as recommended by upstream.
Iosevka has their own configuration system which allows you to graphically customize the font, and export a configuration file that can be used later down the line.
The repository which hosts the fonts originally started out with the goal to allow distributions to build the fonts themselves, which is why it used Makefiles with the help of Rose.
Due to Iosevka requiring NPM packages to be configured, the scope was changed to shipping the TTF files themselves. Florian Müllner therefore ported the repository to shell scripts which allows us to update the files only, heavily simplifying the maintenance process.
The repository and fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License.
Conclusion
We want to thank everyone that contributed to this font switch by testing, discussing, and coding!
Adwaita Fonts will be the default in GNOME 48, and we hope youʼre as happy with this change as we are.