Bug in font spacing

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. As I tested, it works fine on my end, so I couldn’t replicate this issue.

So, would you be able to share the file link with access to support-share@figma.com? It won’t affect your billing. I hope I can investigate it further.

Thanks,
Toku

I reinstalled both the Figma app and the DM Sans font, and that seems to have resolved the issue. However, do you know what might have caused the typeface to behave that way?

Thanks for getting back to us! Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why this happened. Sometimes, conflicts, such as version differences between users in the file, can cause these kinds of issues. You might find this helpful:

I hope this helps!

Toku

Funnily enough, I’ve just come across this same issue!

We have been experiencing the exact same issue. Highly annoying being DM Sans our display font. The letter-spacing gets way too tight all over. For some users, it would get back to the correct letter space setting once double-clicked in the box to select the text but for others it doesn’t.

I have a feeling it might have to do with auto layout and “hug” messing up with the letter-space setting

That doesn’t happen with any other font as far as I have noticed.

Thanks for sharing the issue. I tried to reproduce this on my end but I can’t. Can you submit a bug report please?

We are having the same issues with DM Sans. To me it seems to be related to the optical sizing since the default value (14) is spaced the same as the maximum of 40 (font size 200px). The values 13 and 15 space the letters way further apart.

We’ve also experienced the behavior that Eduardo_Mateos is describing which was probably due to the fact that some of us had the font installed on their device and some used the online version. Since we have Linux users on board we decided to go with the online version for everyone.

Currently we are still struggling with the optical size.

On a side note: We’ve had some problems with Figma and Optical sizing in the past with Helvetica Now.

I don’t think it’s a bug in Figma. The latest version of it is much tighter on Google fonts.DM Sans - Google Fonts

True, maybe it’s an issue in the font file itself.

But when testing the font online, it works as expected.

On Google Fonts? I think there’s an issue when the font reaches a certain size. It looks really tight for me in the browser. I haven’t updated my local version in a while, so everything is fine on my end. However, for anyone downloading the font from Google now, it appears much tighter in Figma.

The weird thing is, if I click on the font in a design (created by someone with the updated version installed), it fixes itself and looks fine. I can’t figure out how this could be a Figma issue, but I could be wrong of course.

I have experienced the same thing with DM Sans – working with web projects is OK since the developer just uses the css value for letter spacing. But very frustrating when exporting graphics from Figma directly.
I cannot say what causes this: to me the “feels” like the optical kerning vs the metric set letter spacing are interfering, which value to be used or overwritten. (Sorry for not being able to give you any better feedback).