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The new font San Francisco, introduced in El Capitan throughout OS X's Finder and contextual menus, is a beautiful font and proves that once again, Apple is on top of their game when it comes to defining the standards of UI and typography.

enter image description here

But when I try to find San Francisco in TextEdit or Keynote, it's not there.

enter image description here

The apps I use, whether Apple apps (Pages, Numbers, TextEdit...) or third-party apps (InDesign, Word...) do not display San Francisco as an option in their font menus.

Here's another example, from Apple's very own Keynote (whose default font is still Helvetica) - no San Francisco there either:

enter image description here

Obviously, this font is there, somewhere in the system, since it's used almost everywhere! And Apple computers are sold with lots of fonts pre-installed in their System Folder, so it seems like a mistake to me, that this one in particular would be unavailable.

So, how could I "unlock" it, or make it usable in other applications?

NOTE: This question was first assuming - wrongly - that San Francisco was made available in Yosemite, which was a mistake. Turns out I still can't find and use it in El Capitan, so I just edited it to say "El Capitan" instead, and add a few images, but some comments might seem irrelevant.

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  • 1
    If you have a paid Apple Developer Account then from Introducing San Francisco click on San Francisco Fonts under Download Fonts and accept the License Agreement...
    – user3439894
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 13:23
  • 2
    San Franciscos is coming with the new OS X version, El Capitan. It's not on Yosemite yet.
    – Arthur
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 16:10
  • Thanks! I thought I was looking at it but it's a different font sized Helvetica that is now being used in Yosemite I guess...
    – MicroMachine
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 23:11
  • Can't vote to close as this question has an open bounty - but imo it's a dupe of apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208849/…
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 20, 2015 at 7:57
  • Which is from october 3rd while mine was posted on sep 19, @Tetsujin imo it's the other one who's a dupe ;)
    – MicroMachine
    Commented Nov 20, 2015 at 8:12

1 Answer 1

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You can download it from here: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/

But there is this note in the license agreement:

IMPORTANT NOTE: THE APPLE SAN FRANCISCO FONT IS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR CREATING MOCK-UPS OF USER INTERFACES TO BE USED IN SOFTWARE PRODUCTS RUNNING ON APPLE’S iOS OR OS X OPERATING SYSTEMS, AS APPLICABLE.

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  • Thank you very much for this! You helped me avoid using it for a professional print project. A "modern" take on type but a rather old approach to copyrights...
    – MicroMachine
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 20:17
  • link doesn't work w/o dev subscription
    – Bret Fisher
    Commented Sep 2, 2016 at 23:23
  • @BretFisher: The link above, and the font download links that appear on that page, all seem to work now (Aug 2021) without a login required. =)
    – jdmc
    Commented Aug 18, 2021 at 17:57

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