Lisnoti

Lisnoti (/lɪzˈnəʊtiː/) is a proportional sans serif font designed for general use but with consideration also given to making it work

in maths, science and actuarial contexts, and
for writing computer code.

Lisnoti is available in regular, italic, bold and bold-italic variants in OpenType (.ttf) and web (.woff and .woff2) formats under the SIL Open Font Licence (OFL).

If you’re interested in why Lisnoti exists, please see this article.

Installing Lisnoti

Using Lisnoti locally

If you want to install Lisnoti on machines for local use then the OpenType font files are here.

Using Lisnoti for websites

The first option is to host the font files yourself (i.e. store them with the rest of your website), in which case all the fonts are here.

The second option is to use the Lisnoti font delivery service, which simply amounts to referencing the style sheet on this site. (Background reading: Google’s guidance on its font delivery service.)

In essence, you want

to include a link in your webpage to the lisnoti.css file at the root of this website, and then
to specify Lisnoti as a font in your styles (just like any other font).

Here’s a skeleton example:

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://lisnoti.com/lisnoti.css">
<style>
body {
  font-family: "Lisnoti", sans-serif;
}
</style>
</head>

Feedback

If you have comments on Lisnoti, please use the GitHub repo discussions page.

Please bear in mind that I am not a typography expert, just a frustrated user.

Key features

Lisnoti is derived from Noto's sans serif fonts, but with the following adaptions:

Reliable distinction of upper case I vs lower case l, and upper case O vs zero 0.
Consistent arithmetic, comparison, logic, set, n-ary and other maths operators, e.g.
- arithmetic: − × ÷ ± ∓ ∞ (NB Noto Sans gets the minus sign wrong)
- comparison: ≤ ≠ ≥ ≈ ≡ ≢ ∝
- logic: ¬ ∧ ∨ ⊻ ⊤ ⊥ ⊦
- set: ∩ ∪ ∈ ∉ ⊂ ⊃ ⊆ ⊇ ∅
- n-ary: ∑ ∏ ⋀ ⋁ ⋂ ⋃
- other: ∫ ∂ √ Δ ∇ ∀ ∃
Greek and Cyrillic letters – maths and logic make frequent use of Greek letters and occasionally Cyrillic ones too.
Consistently formatted digit and – if available – Roman letter sub and superscripts:
- superscript: ⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁽⁾⁺⁻ᵃᵇᶜᵈᵉᶠᵍʰⁱʲᵏˡᵐⁿᵒᵖ𐞥ʳˢᵗᵘᵛʷˣʸᶻᴬᴮꟲᴰᴱꟳᴳᴴᴵᴶᴷᴸᴹᴺᴼᴾꟴᴿᵀᵁⱽᵂ𐞲
- subscript: ₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉₍₎₊₋ₐₑₕᵢⱼₖₗₘₙₒₚᵣₛₜᵤᵥ₝ₓ₞₟
A reasonable selection of symbols, including
- squares, diamonds, rectangles, triangles, circles and stars: ■□▪▫▬▭▮▯▰▱▲△▴▵▶▷▸▹►▻▼▽▾▿◀◁◂◃◄◅◆◇◊○◌●◦◯◻◼◽◾⚪⚫⚬★☆
- arrows: ←↑→↓↔↕ ↖↗↘↙ ⇄ ⇅ ⇵ ⇆ ⇋⇌ ⇐ ⇒⇔ ⇦⇧⇨⇩ ￩￪￫￬
- ticks and crosses: ☐☑☒ ✓✔✕✖✗✘
- box drawing: ─│┌┐└┘├┤┬┴┼╭╮╯╰╱╲╳╴╵╶╷
- game characters: ♔♕♖♗♘♙♚♛♜♝♞♟ ♠♡♢♣♤♥♦♧
- misc but useful: ⌂☸ ♩♪♫♬♭♮♯ ♀♂⚢⚣⚤⚥⚦⚧⚨⚩⚭⚮⚯⚲ ⌘ ␣ ☉ ♿ 円圓
All the operators parsed by Julia (which is itself a good test of a technical font).
Unicode mathematical alphanumeric symbols, e.g. 𝐀𝐴𝑨 𝒜𝒲𝓐 𝔄 𝔸 𝕬 𝖠𝗔𝘈𝘼 𝙰.

(If you want all the above but with a monospaced font, then take a look at Julia Mono.)

Construction

Details of Lisnoti’s construction are set out in the Lisnoti GitHub repo.