tokens.css defined colours, radii and font families but not a single --text-*
step, so font sizes had no baseline to align to and grew wherever they were
needed: 51 distinct sizes across web + desktop, 370 written as arbitrary
values, six at half a pixel (10.5 / 11.5 / 12.5 / 13.5 / 14.5 / 15.5px).
text-xs and text-sm carried nearly all UI text while the range between them —
11, 13, 15px — could only be reached with arbitrary values. Hierarchy does not
come from having more sizes; past a handful, each extra size makes the
hierarchy blurrier.
Add ten role-named steps, each with its own line-height so leading cannot
fragment the way size did, and move every product-UI call site onto them.
Steps are named for what the text is for, not for a t-shirt size, because
that is what keeps the scale from drifting again.
Six steps deliberately keep the exact size/line-height pairs of the Tailwind
defaults they replace, so the ~1,900-call-site rename moves nothing on screen.
The visible changes are confined to former arbitrary values snapping to a step:
8/9/10px -> micro (11px) on badges and overlines; 17 -> 18; 22 -> 24; 30
(text-3xl) -> 36 on headings and stat numbers; 12.8px -> label (13px) on small
buttons and toggles. Half-pixel sizes are gone.
This supersedes #6108, which was reverted by #6116 because the sidebar group
labels rendered at the inherited 16px. The cause was not the scale but cn():
`text-<x>` is ambiguous in Tailwind, and tailwind-merge resolves it against a
table listing only the default sizes, so it filed every role step under
text-colour and dropped whichever of `text-caption` /
`text-sidebar-foreground/70` came first. Registering the steps as a font-size
class group restores the real conflict groups — size beats size, colour beats
colour, the two coexist — and a test pins the list against the scale, since
the failure is silent in source.
Hand-written CSS is covered too. The transcript kept a 12.5px body long after
every Tailwind call site was on the scale, so the "no half-pixel sizes" claim
was true of the classes and false of the product; the editor's prose, code and
mermaid ramps had the same blind spot, and seven of their eight values already
equalled a step exactly. All now reference var(--text-*). The guard test reads
raw `font-size:` declarations as well as class names, exempting only the 16px
iOS input-zoom workaround in base.css and the landing pages' marketing ramp.
apps/mobile (own NativeWind config) and apps/docs (fumadocs' own type system)
keep Tailwind's default scale and are untouched. Landing display type
(rem/clamp, 2.2-6.4rem) stays on its separate ramp, as do four decorative
emoji / serif-hero sizes.
Verified on a running local stack: pinned sidebar rows and group labels
measure 12px/16px, nav items 14px/20px — identical to pre-migration. An audit
of every rendered font size across the product surfaces finds nothing off the
scale; the only exceptions are avatar initials and emoji, which
actor-avatar.tsx sizes proportionally to the avatar diameter by design.
Co-authored-by: Lambda <lambda@multica.ai>
Co-authored-by: multica-agent <github@multica.ai>
