How to display Apple San Francisco's numbers mono-spaced rather than proportionally?

1
votes

I've recently installed El Capitan on OSX, which comes with the new San Franciso font as system font.

The apple presentation here https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=804 (Bit of an overview here: http://codemotionapps.com/san-francisco-display-vs-text-compact-vs-normal-a-brief-review/) states that, by default, numbers are displayed proportionally.

They do allow to switch to displaying them mono-spaced (at least in their API for developers).

I'd like to activate this alternate mode as a user in the Notes app. Is there a shortcut to do this, just as you would, say, mark text as bold?

1
macosfonts
not unless Notes has full OpenType feature control (like, say, InDesign), which as far as I'm aware of, it doesn't. – Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
Ok, to my knowledge, at this point, there seems to be no way to do what I asked for. I'm hoping we'll have this option in the future, though. If so, I will update here and until then, mark Mike's answer as correct. Mike, if you post as an answer, I can mark and accept it. – nontomatic

1 Answers

1
votes

Number formatting of an OpenType font requires having control over which features are active during text shaping, something which typesetting tools will offer (InDesign, XeLaTeX, etc), but which normal productivity tools still (after a decade of Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft all agreeing on using OpenType!) don't offer. Notes included.

So, unfortunately, you'll either have to live with this, or contact the Notes team to get OpenType feature control added, or (entirely legally) run the font through a common, free, professional font tool like FontForge or TTX, (legally) change the default feature set to include monospaced rather than proportional numbers, (legally) generate a new font (remember to also change the metadata so you explain what this new font is: not the original, and not 'yours'), and then (legally) install that on your own machine.

Although despite all of that being legal, you will have violated the font license, so that's a thing to keep in mind.