San Francisco (sans-serif typeface) San Francisco (sans-serif typeface) San Francisco is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface made by Apple Inc. It was first released to developers on November 18, 2014. It is the first new typeface designed at Apple in nearly 20 years and has been inspired by Helvetica and FF DIN. The San Francisco typeface has four variants: "SF" (or "SF UI") for macOS, iOS, and tvOS; "SF Compact" for watchOS; "SF Mono" (based on SF Compact) for the Xcode application; and "SF Serif" for Apple Books. The main difference is that the sides of letters with round shapes, such as "o", "e", and
Helvetica stroke widths within a glyph. Nimbus Sans L, a version of URW's Nimbus Sans spaced to match the standard Linotype/PostScript version of Helvetica, was released under the GNU General Public License in 1996, and donated to the Ghostscript project to create a free PostScript alternative. It (or a derivative) is used by much open-source software such as R as a system font. A derivative of this family known as "TeX Gyre Heros" has been prepared for use in the TeX scientific document preparation software. FreeSans, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Sans L, which in turn descends from Helvetica.