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Bundled fonts

The UI ships one font file. It is bundled rather than fetched, so the extension makes no network request to render its own pages. That is what PRIVACY.md promises, and it is what a Chrome Web Store review expects of a "no remote code" extension.

Inter
Family Inter
Release v4.1, https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/tag/v4.1
File taken web/InterVariable.woff2 from Inter-4.1.zip
Shipped as public/fonts/InterVariable.woff2
Size 352,240 bytes
sha256 693b77d4f32ee9b8bfc995589b5fad5e99adf2832738661f5402f9978429a8e3
Licence SIL Open Font License 1.1, text in public/fonts/Inter-OFL.txt

public/ is Vite's publicDir, so the file is copied verbatim to dist/fonts/, the same way public/icons/ already ships. design/tokens.css declares the @font-face with the root-absolute URL /fonts/InterVariable.woff2. Vite leaves root-absolute url() alone, and on a chrome-extension:// page it resolves to the extension root.

InterVariable-Italic.woff2 is deliberately not shipped, because the UI has no italics. go.html loads no font at all. It is the dispatch hot path, and a font fetch, even a local one, is work it does not need.

Licence obligations

OFL-1.1 requires that the licence text travel with the font, and that the font is not sold on its own. public/fonts/Inter-OFL.txt is the unmodified LICENSE.txt from the release. It is copied into dist/ alongside the woff2, so an installed extension carries it. The font is unmodified, so the Reserved Font Name clause does not bite.

Why the whole variable file and not a Latin subset

352 KB is large for what the UI actually draws. But the official release publishes no subset, and subsetting would need a tool (fonttools/pyftsubset or subset-font) that this repo does not depend on. The repo's rule is no new dependencies. Instead the @font-face in design/tokens.css carries the standard Latin unicode-range, so the browser rasterises that range and leaves the rest of the file idle on disk.

That range is not a description of what the UI draws. Two glyphs the UI renders fall outside it. So they repaint mid-string in the system fallback, at a different weight and baseline from the Inter around them:

  • → (U+2192): the popup destination arrow, the options live preview, and the merge-import rename summary. The range includes the adjacent U+2191 and U+2193, but not this one.
  • ⌘ (U+2318): the popup footer hint Tab completes · ⌘/Ctrl+Enter new tab.

Adding U+2192, U+2318 to the range is a one-line change to design/tokens.css. That is the approved bundle, and it is not edited outside a design change. So raise it with the design owner, or drop the two glyphs from the UI copy when the popup and options are restyled.

If subsetting is ever worth it, do it as a checked-in artefact with the command recorded here, not as a build step.

Keeping the two copies identical

The font exists twice on purpose:

  • design/fonts/, so design/'s previews render standalone in a browser, with no build.
  • public/fonts/, so the extension ships it.

They must stay byte-identical, and the shipped copy must hash to the value recorded in the table above. A test asserted both by sha256-ing the bytes until the suite was cut back to behaviour a user meets; check it by hand (shasum -a 256 design/fonts/* public/fonts/*) when you change the release, and update the table.

Known issue in the design previews

The previews do not actually render in Inter yet. design/preview.css line 15 declares the harness @font-face as src: url('../fonts/InterVariable.woff2'), and a relative url() resolves against the stylesheet's own URL. So from design/preview.css it points at <repo>/fonts/InterVariable.woff2, which does not exist. The font is at design/fonts/. Every page under design/foundations, design/components and design/patterns therefore falls back to the system font, and no preview reads the design/fonts/ copy above. (The @font-face in design/tokens.css is root-absolute, /fonts/…, which is correct for a chrome-extension:// page and cannot resolve from a file:// preview. That is why preview.css redeclares it.)

design/ is the approved bundle and is not edited outside a design change. The design owner should change that line to url('fonts/InterVariable.woff2'). Nothing the extension ships is affected: this is the review surface only.