After the deploy last Thursday various users on Village Pumps bug
reports and external sites (e.g. Twitter and Reddit) were informing us
that the new typography was unreadable. Sadly it was difficult to
distinguish whether this was simply a dislike of the new fonts or
something deeper related to a bug.
After lots of experimentation and reaching out to users on Friday, we
discovered that the free fonts in the stack were rendering very poorly
on some Windows machines. I experimented with some live hacks to beta
labs to try and identify the problems [1] with a user who was
experiencing the problem. I tested various things like
text-size-adjust and font size. The problem that caused the text to be
unreadable for the user was the Liberation Sans font [2]
I tried to restore Arimo [3] and although it was fine for this
particular user, it wasn't fine for another user, meaning both our
fonts were causing issues. As a result, I have pulled together a small
patch to remove these fonts [4]. This is meant as only a short term
solution.
As for a long term solution, what can we do? Ideas in my head involve
1) Picking a new open font that is either
** widely available on Linux but not so much on Windows
** renders well in Windows
2) We create our own open font, maybe forking an existing font.
3) We restore these two fonts to the font stack but using JavaScript
either enable or disable them on Windows machines
4) We identify the issues here with the existing fonts, filing
upstream bugs and find a timeframe in which we can restore them by
5) Insert your idea here
I welcome your ideas on how we can find an open font that keeps all users happy.
Is it worth opening an RFC on
MediaWiki.org to discuss our options some more?
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css…
[2]
http://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/86501
[3]
http://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/86501...86502
[4]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/124387