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Cover image for Bahnschrift as System Font
David Blue
David Blue

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Bahnschrift as System Font

As someone who is always desperately (and yet unconsciously) seeking new and creative ways of avoiding what I actually intend to be doing, I have encountered the concept of Custom System Fonts many times over the years, and yet I do not recall any of them resulting in an outcome other than concession. Usually, whatever font you choose is going to look like shit and break stuff.

For instance, when I attempted to change Windows 10's system font to Acumin Pro (my latest typographical crush) recently, it was gorgeous!... And then I opened CopyQ, my clipboard manager, and saw this:

CopyQ Broken Text

I probably should’ve given up there, but instead, I reached out to my latest pet reference, Read It!

"What's a good alternative system font?" asked Leo_Grum to which FatFaceRikky replied with "Apparently MS wants or wanted to replace Segoe UI with Bahnschrift. Not sure if this plan is still current" along with a hyperlink to Bahnschrift's Microsoft Documentation page.

Bahnschrift = Railroad Writing

I don't actually know anything about typography, but those of you who do will have your curiosity stimulated by the document, I'm sure:

The current version of Bahnschrift began development in 2016. At the time, Google, Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft partnered to develop a common implementation of variable font technology and Bahnschrift was chosen to become Microsoft’s first variable font. To prepare for the transition from static to variable, the Bahnschrift source was completely rebuilt from the ground up by Aaron Bell of Saja Typeworks and was expanded in weight, character set (adding Extended Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic) and manual hinting to ensure high quality rendering on a wide range of devices.

Bahnschrift Type Banner

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