9 ms·

Fira Sans: a Free, Open Source Typeface Commissioned by Mozilla

338 points by Boriss 12y ago

broodbucket 12y ago
I wandered the internet for years looking for the perfect monospace font for me. There was never anything that fit; Ubuntu Mono was nice but a bit too "unprofessional", Liberation/Droid too boring, Microsoft/Apple fonts didn't fit either. I looked through so many font comparison sites, tried a whole bunch, just ended up sticking with the defaults. Then I found Fira Mono. I use it everywhere. It looks great; it's very clear and easy to read, it has a nice style. Fonts are a very personal thing so thanks to Mozilla for finally letting me have one that was "mine".
- lygaret 12y ago
  Totally agree. I _really_ wish there was an italic variant; that would pretty much guarantee it'd be the only monospace I use again.
- hornetblack 12y ago
  I'm still comparing Fira Mono and Source Code Pro. They are both very nice. https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro
  - temporary_art 12y ago
    I'm a huge fan of Anonymous Pro... If you want to compare with something else. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
  - Demiurge 12y ago
    Source Code Pro Light is the only code/terminal font I can use on OSX without being mad about the fatty rendering! It's perfect!
  - buddystiff 12y ago
    You could only truly compare Source Code Pro if the designer made Fira Sans Mono. I wonder if he has? That'd fix the lowercase r problem, I would think.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Go proportionally spaced fonts for code and don't look back.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    Let me know how that works for you if you ever write Lisp, Haskell, or have to deal with someone who thought they could make their $ALGOL_INSPIRED_LANGUAGE look cute by aligning everything into tables.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Mono space is a type writer anachronism. Lisp was designed in hype 60s and not many people write code in it; Haskell could benefit from better mathematical typesetting. I've heard that going proportional would be bad, but I made the switch and have noticed yet any badly formatted third party code (I mostly use C#).
      - edwintorok 12y ago
        Are you using a serif font? Because sans-serif is very bad when it comes to representing source code: the characters 1lI and 0O all look alike. For example Pidgin's choice of a sans-serif font always caused me troubles, had to either switch the font, or the system-wide sans-serif font to something where I can tell the difference.
        seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Segoe UI. Honestly, I knew this would be a problem but I haven't had this problem yet. The most annoying thing is that subtraction (-) is too short in relation to addition (+).
        Silhouette 12y ago
        In my ideal world, code would be typeset in proportional fonts, with mathematically appropriate glyphs chosen from a font with a comprehensive Unicode character set, including a proper minus instead of hyphen-minus. The usual problems with this are arranging indentations/alignments neatly where you really do want them and avoiding an explosion of funny characters once you've got a large part of the Unicode character set to play with. Tools are pretty good at the first these days, but pity the poor Haskell developers if we don't fix the second. People will be writing logging libraries that use different levels of emoticon to save writing 'debug' and 'error'...
- Svip 12y ago
  Strange your list seems to be lacking DejaVu Mono. Just never came about it? Not that I dislike your final choice of Fira Mono. But I always thought DejaVu Mono was the best monospaced typeface out there for years.
  - joosters 12y ago
    Same here, DejaVu Mono in my terminal. Just tried the Fira Mono and it is OK but the line spacing seems far too big for my taste.
    - noir_lord 12y ago
      on xfce4-term the linespacing looks about 1.5 compared to Droid sans Mono. Costs to many lines on screen, nice font though.
      - middleclick 12y ago
        I have the same issue. A sad thing, the font looks good but the line spacing is way too much for my taste.
        georgevreilly 12y ago
        Download Fira Mono OT from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64, and you'll get 30% more lines.
  - broodbucket 12y ago
    It didn't come to mind but I do like DejaVu, just not a huge amount. It was typically the pick of the pre-installed for sure.
- Monkeyget 12y ago
  Fira Mono takes an awful lot of vertical space. To me it looks like inconsolata but less legible due to extra serif.
  - buddystiff 12y ago
    I kinda like it. It forces a comfortable min line height that makes it very readable. However, upon further investigation it breaks readability of text in menus/lists that have max height shorter than the expected standard fonts line height. Hence cutting off the text... huge bummer. Oh well, back to uncomfortably dense fonts :(
  - alxndr 12y ago
    After reading a few shell scripts in Fira Mono, I find the serif on the lowercase "r" very distracting compared to Inconsolata. The lowercase "i" too, even though it looks very similar to Inconsolata's lowercase "i". Also, for some reason I find the dot in the number "0" to be more distracting than using a slash to distinguish it from an uppercase "O".
- lomnakkus 12y ago
  Another font which is very nice for code IMO is Fantasque[0,1]. It's a lot less "rigid" than most other monospace fonts, but after some use I actually found that it helps readability overall. [0] http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono [1] https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
  - sogen 12y ago
    Wow, great find man, Fantastique!
  - rhizome 12y ago
    that looped lowercase-k is awful
- cmyr 12y ago
  I'm a big big fan of Bistream Vera Sans Mono. It walks the line between being humane and being rigorous quite well, in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera
- calinet6 12y ago
  Monaco has always been excellent for me.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  Do you try Hermit font ? Made by a programer for programers.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
So glad that I found this font I have a project this weekend this will be perfect for. Have been looking for a new heading font for a while. Have been having a lot of fun with Campton and Open Sans (my standard) but this one has such a great style.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cpeterso 12y ago
Fira's designer Erik Spiekermann says the typeface's original name was "Feura", but English-speakers pronounced that name as "führer": https://twitter.com/espiekermann/status/359353798663221248 https://twitter.com/espiekermann/status/359353798663221248
- copperx 12y ago
  Führer means leader, not Hitler. What's the problem?
  - edent 12y ago
    The fact that Hitler isn't mentioned in GP, nor Twitter, tells you exactly what the problem is.
  - orik 12y ago
    There's a strong associate between the two. Example: It's the first thing your mind jumped too although cpeterso never mentioned the Hitler in his comment.
  - SeanDav 12y ago
    The problem is perception. If people associate the name with Hitler (and I think they do), then no matter what the "correct" definition is, the name will be what people think it is. This is how languages evolve. If enough people think something about a word, then over time there is a good chance that word will morph into the the new meaning. The same thing happens with pronunciation. For example, originally the "correct" pronunciation of the word "forte" was "fort", however most people think and use "fortay". Now most dictionaries will give both pronunciations or even the "incorrect" one and over time it will almost certainly change into "fortay" completely.
  - Svip 12y ago
    If we are going to be pedantic, then „Führer” means someone who leads, whereas „Leiter” is more close to the English term ‘leader’. ‘Leader’ and „Leiter” share the same etymology, „Führer” does not. The same difference is present in Danish as well: »leder« vs »fører«. Essentially, „ein Führer” is more than just a leader.
gojomo 12y ago
Do I understand the post correctly that the font is bundled in Firefox and thus usable with no download lag? (If so, does that go equally for all variants?)
- DiabloD3 12y ago
  Now only we need is Chrome to bundle it as well.
- Boriss 12y ago
  It isn't bundled now, but will be soon
edwintorok 12y ago
Fira Sans is also one of the 3 free fonts (along with Charter and Source Code Pro) recommended by Butterick's Practical Typography: http://practicaltypography.com/ http://practicaltypography.com/ It is also used in Racket's documentation: http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/fira-sans/ http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/fira-sans/ And here is how I use it in LaTeX: % Font settings \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Serif body font \usepackage{charter} % Math font \usepackage[charter]{mathdesign} % Monospaced font \usepackage{sourcecodepro} % Sans-serif font \usepackage[lf]{FiraSans}
- r0muald 12y ago
  The comments on that review at typographica point out that Fira's quality for non-Latin scripts is less than perfect. Butterick generally ignores this part of the Unicode spectrum, to the point where his own fonts completely miss non-Latin scripts.
  - mlkmt 12y ago
    This makes me wish there was a SCM of sorts for fonts so that collaborating on them would be easier.
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      There is, but it is not clear to me which variant is the "master" font, is it the OTF? https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira
      - mlkmt 12y ago
        Nice, but I didn't mean putting the binary files on git. It's not easy to see changes since the file format is not text based.
        edwintorok 12y ago
        Yeah it'd be nice if they used something like UFO ( http://unifiedfontobject.org/ http://unifiedfontobject.org/), or even Fontforge's SFD. It should be possible to take each binary OTF, export it with fontforge, and create a "mirror" repository where you can see the changes in a more human-readable format.
gkoberger 12y ago
Previous HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6440962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6440962
jph 12y ago
Gorgeous font. I'll donate $50 toward an italic monospace.
BjoernKW 12y ago
Very cool. Just a few days ago I saw Fira's designer Erik Spiekermann give talk on 'Type Is Visible Language'
gioele 12y ago
> So great, in fact, that we’ll be using it in Firefox’s in-content pages such as Preferences and the Add-ons Manager. I prefer applications to use the default fonts provided by the operating system. Consistency before aesthetics.
- Boriss 12y ago
  True, but using a built-in font does mean Firefox is consistent across operating systems. Unfortunately, it's tough to be consistent across both OSes and applications within an OS!
  - teacup50 12y ago
    That's not what I want. I don't use the other operating systems, and I don't care if Firefox is consistent across them. You care if Firefox is consistent, and that's just arrogance, because you are not the platform. If everyone did what you're doing, then the platform would have no common consistency at all. Put away your designer arrogance; my Mac isn't your canvas on which to ruin platform consistency.
    - ubernostrum 12y ago
      Wow, you're a really pleasant person. And not arrogant at all, nope.
      - teacup50 12y ago
        In this case, the decision is arrogantly wrong because it's predicated on an over-inflated sense of Firefox's position relative to the entire platform and ecosystem of consistent applications, and this position is based on self-interest, putting branding interests and their designer's ego ahead of the interests of their customers.
        calinet6 12y ago
        Design exists. It is not egotistical by nature. It's not going away. Get used to it.
zatkin 12y ago
Does anyone have this font in woff format?
- edwintorok 12y ago
  https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/tree/master/woff https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/tree/master/woff
Mithaldu 12y ago
I'm very impressed by this font, since it is the only font coming out of the open source community that i can remember which has hinting info, meaning it will still look good at font size 8 without smoothing.
- calinet6 12y ago
  And it really does, too. One of the first things I noticed was how legible the small point sizes were. Fantastic.
chris_wot 12y ago
Perhaps I'm blind, but what is the license for Fira Sans?
- andreastt 12y ago
  It's licensed under SIL Open Font License 1.1: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/LICENSE
SimeVidas 12y ago
16 weights? What are the corresponding CSS font-weight values?
- igravious 12y ago
  ask, and ye shall receive: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/fira.css https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/fira.css
keithpeter 12y ago
Nice range of weights. Anyone know a source where I can get the Liberation fonts in a similar range? My Debian installation just has three weights.
_random_ 12y ago
It's OK, I guess.
kator 12y ago
I find I prefer fonts that I don't have to anti-alias. It seems all of these look quite horrific in iTerm2 unless you turn on anti-alias which then makes them feel to soft and fuzzy to me.
- Demiurge 12y ago
  Try Source Code Pro Light with aliasing.
  - kator 12y ago
    That's the point I don't want aliasing. It softens things too much. I tried it in iTerm2 without anti-alias on and it was horrific.
izietto 12y ago
M is really ugly, just on my PC or for you too?
mtford 12y ago
Looks like it's down, and the official links for download don't seem to work anymore. It's available here on github tho: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira
- FootballMuse 12y ago
  The links are up for me, but Github currently has an older version of the font.
unethical_ban 12y ago
As we discuss this, can HN get away from using Verdana? The site looks less than pleasing when viewing from a FOSS Linux install; to get the HN official look, I must install ttf third party stuff.
- unethical_ban 12y ago
  It is a courtesy to explain downvoting when there is no controversy evident in the post. Let me explain my post: There are myriad open fonts available on the web, and webfonts is a known, stable feature of web browsers. There is no reason to use proprietary fonts on a tech website of such a caliber.
ComputerGuru 12y ago
OK, so the zip file has 32 OTF files in a subfolder - awesome. But how does one install the .glyph files in the parent folder on, say, OS X? I tried installing just the OTF files, but the extra glyphs are apparently not embedded in them and are inaccessible from (eg) Adobe Illustrator. I can't find out how to embed the .glyphs (FiraSans_140521.glyphs and FiraSansItalic_140521.glyphs) into the OTF?
- cristiantincu 12y ago
  The glyphs files are the sources. They can be opened with Glyphs (http://www.glyphsapp.com/ http://www.glyphsapp.com/).
thenduks 12y ago
I've instantly fallen in love with (the mono version of) this font. One thing that is a bit unfortunate though is it seems to have some odd line-height/descender thing going on. In Sublime Text 2/3 I can fix this easily with: "line_padding_top": 0, "line_padding_bottom": -2 But in iTerm2 all you get is a basic 'vertical character spacing' setting, and the best I could do looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/bfada15f2d749c70afcfa94fd0aed04607ded834.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/bfada15f2d749c70afcfa94fd0aed...
- Watabou 12y ago
  Also using iTerm2, but I don't seem to have that problem: http://cl.ly/VhXX http://cl.ly/VhXX I haven't touched any vertical and horizontal spacing settings.
  - thenduks 12y ago
    Interesting. If I leave the spacing settings closer to the default then it looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/14bdd3324070f790b7f1c54b1b343bc0a0f6f3f9.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/14bdd3324070f790b7f1c54b1b343... Which looks more like your screenshot, and is no longer lopsided, but IMO still looks pretty bad. I guess I just like tight lines. The huge cursor block is... I don't know distracting somehow. My current terminal uses plain old Menlo and it looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/827024555adee7d98c3a926c76c4f18e96cf291b.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/827024555adee7d98c3a926c76c4f... I don't mind my terminal font being different than my editor, so I'll still get a lot of use out of Fira.
cjensen 12y ago
The sample on the page looks pretty horrific in terms of kerning. I'm not very fussy about fonts. Am I the only one seeing this? Does the sample fairly represent actual use?
- psychometry 12y ago
  It's not great. The "Me" in "Medium" in that PNG is most egregious. I'm not sure whether it's a problem with the font or if their designer was messing around with letter spacing in Photoshop.
azinman2 12y ago
Looks reasonably nice at middle font sizes but chrome in my Mac renders the <14pt fonts quite poorly. Wonder why...
kudu 12y ago
If you need to load this from a CDN, it's available through Brick (http://brick.im/ http://brick.im/).
blue11 12y ago
The monospace version of the font has too much vertical spacing to be used for programming. Everything looks double spaced.
userbinator 12y ago
The title in the sample image looks like "hra sans 3.1", with a really funny-looking 'h'.
- spopejoy 12y ago
  "hra" -- sounds like the perfect lapine font! can change it to "hrair" when they get to version 5
jumpwah 12y ago
More glyphs: http://mozilla.github.io/Fira/ http://mozilla.github.io/Fira/

338 points by Boriss 12y ago

I wandered the internet for years looking for the perfect monospace font for me. There was never anything that fit; Ubuntu Mono was nice but a bit too "unprofessional", Liberation/Droid too boring, Microsoft/Apple fonts didn't fit either. I looked through so many font comparison sites, tried a whole bunch, just ended up sticking with the defaults. Then I found Fira Mono. I use it everywhere. It looks great; it's very clear and easy to read, it has a nice style. Fonts are a very personal thing so thanks to Mozilla for finally letting me have one that was "mine".

lygaret 12y ago
Totally agree. I _really_ wish there was an italic variant; that would pretty much guarantee it'd be the only monospace I use again.
hornetblack 12y ago
I'm still comparing Fira Mono and Source Code Pro. They are both very nice. https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro
- temporary_art 12y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Anonymous Pro... If you want to compare with something else. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
- Demiurge 12y ago
  Source Code Pro Light is the only code/terminal font I can use on OSX without being mad about the fatty rendering! It's perfect!
- buddystiff 12y ago
  You could only truly compare Source Code Pro if the designer made Fira Sans Mono. I wonder if he has? That'd fix the lowercase r problem, I would think.
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Go proportionally spaced fonts for code and don't look back.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Let me know how that works for you if you ever write Lisp, Haskell, or have to deal with someone who thought they could make their $ALGOL_INSPIRED_LANGUAGE look cute by aligning everything into tables.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Mono space is a type writer anachronism. Lisp was designed in hype 60s and not many people write code in it; Haskell could benefit from better mathematical typesetting. I've heard that going proportional would be bad, but I made the switch and have noticed yet any badly formatted third party code (I mostly use C#).
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      Are you using a serif font? Because sans-serif is very bad when it comes to representing source code: the characters 1lI and 0O all look alike. For example Pidgin's choice of a sans-serif font always caused me troubles, had to either switch the font, or the system-wide sans-serif font to something where I can tell the difference.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Segoe UI. Honestly, I knew this would be a problem but I haven't had this problem yet. The most annoying thing is that subtraction (-) is too short in relation to addition (+).
        Silhouette 12y ago
        In my ideal world, code would be typeset in proportional fonts, with mathematically appropriate glyphs chosen from a font with a comprehensive Unicode character set, including a proper minus instead of hyphen-minus. The usual problems with this are arranging indentations/alignments neatly where you really do want them and avoiding an explosion of funny characters once you've got a large part of the Unicode character set to play with. Tools are pretty good at the first these days, but pity the poor Haskell developers if we don't fix the second. People will be writing logging libraries that use different levels of emoticon to save writing 'debug' and 'error'...
Svip 12y ago
Strange your list seems to be lacking DejaVu Mono. Just never came about it? Not that I dislike your final choice of Fira Mono. But I always thought DejaVu Mono was the best monospaced typeface out there for years.
- joosters 12y ago
  Same here, DejaVu Mono in my terminal. Just tried the Fira Mono and it is OK but the line spacing seems far too big for my taste.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    on xfce4-term the linespacing looks about 1.5 compared to Droid sans Mono. Costs to many lines on screen, nice font though.
    - middleclick 12y ago
      I have the same issue. A sad thing, the font looks good but the line spacing is way too much for my taste.
      - georgevreilly 12y ago
        Download Fira Mono OT from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64, and you'll get 30% more lines.
- broodbucket 12y ago
  It didn't come to mind but I do like DejaVu, just not a huge amount. It was typically the pick of the pre-installed for sure.
Monkeyget 12y ago
Fira Mono takes an awful lot of vertical space. To me it looks like inconsolata but less legible due to extra serif.
- buddystiff 12y ago
  I kinda like it. It forces a comfortable min line height that makes it very readable. However, upon further investigation it breaks readability of text in menus/lists that have max height shorter than the expected standard fonts line height. Hence cutting off the text... huge bummer. Oh well, back to uncomfortably dense fonts :(
- alxndr 12y ago
  After reading a few shell scripts in Fira Mono, I find the serif on the lowercase "r" very distracting compared to Inconsolata. The lowercase "i" too, even though it looks very similar to Inconsolata's lowercase "i". Also, for some reason I find the dot in the number "0" to be more distracting than using a slash to distinguish it from an uppercase "O".
lomnakkus 12y ago
Another font which is very nice for code IMO is Fantasque[0,1]. It's a lot less "rigid" than most other monospace fonts, but after some use I actually found that it helps readability overall. [0] http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono [1] https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
- sogen 12y ago
  Wow, great find man, Fantastique!
- rhizome 12y ago
  that looped lowercase-k is awful
cmyr 12y ago
I'm a big big fan of Bistream Vera Sans Mono. It walks the line between being humane and being rigorous quite well, in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera
calinet6 12y ago
Monaco has always been excellent for me.
Zardoz84 12y ago
Do you try Hermit font ? Made by a programer for programers.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

So glad that I found this font I have a project this weekend this will be perfect for. Have been looking for a new heading font for a while. Have been having a lot of fun with Campton and Open Sans (my standard) but this one has such a great style.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

cpeterso 12y ago

Fira's designer Erik Spiekermann says the typeface's original name was "Feura", but English-speakers pronounced that name as "führer": https://twitter.com/espiekermann/status/359353798663221248 https://twitter.com/espiekermann/status/359353798663221248

copperx 12y ago
Führer means leader, not Hitler. What's the problem?
- edent 12y ago
  The fact that Hitler isn't mentioned in GP, nor Twitter, tells you exactly what the problem is.
- orik 12y ago
  There's a strong associate between the two. Example: It's the first thing your mind jumped too although cpeterso never mentioned the Hitler in his comment.
- SeanDav 12y ago
  The problem is perception. If people associate the name with Hitler (and I think they do), then no matter what the "correct" definition is, the name will be what people think it is. This is how languages evolve. If enough people think something about a word, then over time there is a good chance that word will morph into the the new meaning. The same thing happens with pronunciation. For example, originally the "correct" pronunciation of the word "forte" was "fort", however most people think and use "fortay". Now most dictionaries will give both pronunciations or even the "incorrect" one and over time it will almost certainly change into "fortay" completely.
- Svip 12y ago
  If we are going to be pedantic, then „Führer” means someone who leads, whereas „Leiter” is more close to the English term ‘leader’. ‘Leader’ and „Leiter” share the same etymology, „Führer” does not. The same difference is present in Danish as well: »leder« vs »fører«. Essentially, „ein Führer” is more than just a leader.

gojomo 12y ago

Do I understand the post correctly that the font is bundled in Firefox and thus usable with no download lag? (If so, does that go equally for all variants?)

DiabloD3 12y ago
Now only we need is Chrome to bundle it as well.
Boriss 12y ago
It isn't bundled now, but will be soon

edwintorok 12y ago

Fira Sans is also one of the 3 free fonts (along with Charter and Source Code Pro) recommended by Butterick's Practical Typography: http://practicaltypography.com/ http://practicaltypography.com/ It is also used in Racket's documentation: http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/fira-sans/ http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/fira-sans/ And here is how I use it in LaTeX: % Font settings \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Serif body font \usepackage{charter} % Math font \usepackage[charter]{mathdesign} % Monospaced font \usepackage{sourcecodepro} % Sans-serif font \usepackage[lf]{FiraSans}

r0muald 12y ago
The comments on that review at typographica point out that Fira's quality for non-Latin scripts is less than perfect. Butterick generally ignores this part of the Unicode spectrum, to the point where his own fonts completely miss non-Latin scripts.
- mlkmt 12y ago
  This makes me wish there was a SCM of sorts for fonts so that collaborating on them would be easier.
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    There is, but it is not clear to me which variant is the "master" font, is it the OTF? https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira
    - mlkmt 12y ago
      Nice, but I didn't mean putting the binary files on git. It's not easy to see changes since the file format is not text based.
      - edwintorok 12y ago
        Yeah it'd be nice if they used something like UFO ( http://unifiedfontobject.org/ http://unifiedfontobject.org/), or even Fontforge's SFD. It should be possible to take each binary OTF, export it with fontforge, and create a "mirror" repository where you can see the changes in a more human-readable format.

gkoberger 12y ago

Previous HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6440962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6440962

jph 12y ago

Gorgeous font. I'll donate $50 toward an italic monospace.

BjoernKW 12y ago

Very cool. Just a few days ago I saw Fira's designer Erik Spiekermann give talk on 'Type Is Visible Language'

gioele 12y ago

> So great, in fact, that we’ll be using it in Firefox’s in-content pages such as Preferences and the Add-ons Manager. I prefer applications to use the default fonts provided by the operating system. Consistency before aesthetics.

Boriss 12y ago
True, but using a built-in font does mean Firefox is consistent across operating systems. Unfortunately, it's tough to be consistent across both OSes and applications within an OS!
- teacup50 12y ago
  That's not what I want. I don't use the other operating systems, and I don't care if Firefox is consistent across them. You care if Firefox is consistent, and that's just arrogance, because you are not the platform. If everyone did what you're doing, then the platform would have no common consistency at all. Put away your designer arrogance; my Mac isn't your canvas on which to ruin platform consistency.
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    Wow, you're a really pleasant person. And not arrogant at all, nope.
    - teacup50 12y ago
      In this case, the decision is arrogantly wrong because it's predicated on an over-inflated sense of Firefox's position relative to the entire platform and ecosystem of consistent applications, and this position is based on self-interest, putting branding interests and their designer's ego ahead of the interests of their customers.
      - calinet6 12y ago
        Design exists. It is not egotistical by nature. It's not going away. Get used to it.

zatkin 12y ago

Does anyone have this font in woff format?

edwintorok 12y ago
https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/tree/master/woff https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/tree/master/woff

Mithaldu 12y ago

I'm very impressed by this font, since it is the only font coming out of the open source community that i can remember which has hinting info, meaning it will still look good at font size 8 without smoothing.

calinet6 12y ago
And it really does, too. One of the first things I noticed was how legible the small point sizes were. Fantastic.

chris_wot 12y ago

Perhaps I'm blind, but what is the license for Fira Sans?

andreastt 12y ago
It's licensed under SIL Open Font License 1.1: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/LICENSE

SimeVidas 12y ago

16 weights? What are the corresponding CSS font-weight values?

igravious 12y ago
ask, and ye shall receive: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/fira.css https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/blob/master/fira.css

keithpeter 12y ago

Nice range of weights. Anyone know a source where I can get the Liberation fonts in a similar range? My Debian installation just has three weights.

_random_ 12y ago

It's OK, I guess.

kator 12y ago

I find I prefer fonts that I don't have to anti-alias. It seems all of these look quite horrific in iTerm2 unless you turn on anti-alias which then makes them feel to soft and fuzzy to me.

Demiurge 12y ago
Try Source Code Pro Light with aliasing.
- kator 12y ago
  That's the point I don't want aliasing. It softens things too much. I tried it in iTerm2 without anti-alias on and it was horrific.

izietto 12y ago

M is really ugly, just on my PC or for you too?

mtford 12y ago

Looks like it's down, and the official links for download don't seem to work anymore. It's available here on github tho: https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira

FootballMuse 12y ago
The links are up for me, but Github currently has an older version of the font.

unethical_ban 12y ago

As we discuss this, can HN get away from using Verdana? The site looks less than pleasing when viewing from a FOSS Linux install; to get the HN official look, I must install ttf third party stuff.

unethical_ban 12y ago
It is a courtesy to explain downvoting when there is no controversy evident in the post. Let me explain my post: There are myriad open fonts available on the web, and webfonts is a known, stable feature of web browsers. There is no reason to use proprietary fonts on a tech website of such a caliber.

ComputerGuru 12y ago

OK, so the zip file has 32 OTF files in a subfolder - awesome. But how does one install the .glyph files in the parent folder on, say, OS X? I tried installing just the OTF files, but the extra glyphs are apparently not embedded in them and are inaccessible from (eg) Adobe Illustrator. I can't find out how to embed the .glyphs (FiraSans_140521.glyphs and FiraSansItalic_140521.glyphs) into the OTF?

cristiantincu 12y ago
The glyphs files are the sources. They can be opened with Glyphs (http://www.glyphsapp.com/ http://www.glyphsapp.com/).

thenduks 12y ago

I've instantly fallen in love with (the mono version of) this font. One thing that is a bit unfortunate though is it seems to have some odd line-height/descender thing going on. In Sublime Text 2/3 I can fix this easily with: "line_padding_top": 0, "line_padding_bottom": -2 But in iTerm2 all you get is a basic 'vertical character spacing' setting, and the best I could do looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/bfada15f2d749c70afcfa94fd0aed04607ded834.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/bfada15f2d749c70afcfa94fd0aed...

Watabou 12y ago
Also using iTerm2, but I don't seem to have that problem: http://cl.ly/VhXX http://cl.ly/VhXX I haven't touched any vertical and horizontal spacing settings.
- thenduks 12y ago
  Interesting. If I leave the spacing settings closer to the default then it looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/14bdd3324070f790b7f1c54b1b343bc0a0f6f3f9.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/14bdd3324070f790b7f1c54b1b343... Which looks more like your screenshot, and is no longer lopsided, but IMO still looks pretty bad. I guess I just like tight lines. The huge cursor block is... I don't know distracting somehow. My current terminal uses plain old Menlo and it looks like this: http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/827024555adee7d98c3a926c76c4f18e96cf291b.png http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/827024555adee7d98c3a926c76c4f... I don't mind my terminal font being different than my editor, so I'll still get a lot of use out of Fira.

cjensen 12y ago

The sample on the page looks pretty horrific in terms of kerning. I'm not very fussy about fonts. Am I the only one seeing this? Does the sample fairly represent actual use?

psychometry 12y ago
It's not great. The "Me" in "Medium" in that PNG is most egregious. I'm not sure whether it's a problem with the font or if their designer was messing around with letter spacing in Photoshop.

azinman2 12y ago

Looks reasonably nice at middle font sizes but chrome in my Mac renders the <14pt fonts quite poorly. Wonder why...

kudu 12y ago

If you need to load this from a CDN, it's available through Brick (http://brick.im/ http://brick.im/).

blue11 12y ago

The monospace version of the font has too much vertical spacing to be used for programming. Everything looks double spaced.

userbinator 12y ago

The title in the sample image looks like "hra sans 3.1", with a really funny-looking 'h'.

spopejoy 12y ago
"hra" -- sounds like the perfect lapine font! can change it to "hrair" when they get to version 5

jumpwah 12y ago

More glyphs: http://mozilla.github.io/Fira/ http://mozilla.github.io/Fira/