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