On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/04/14 20:19, Jon Robson wrote:
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
- 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&action=history [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
- Restore the status quo - specifying 'sans-serif' as the font, which
translates to the default font for the platform, had none of these problems, and resulted in fonts for all platforms which were good for those platforms (though perhaps not necessarily the best).
- Windows users got fonts optimised for Windows, and which Windows knows well how to render. They may not be free, but /we/ weren't the ones prioritising the non-free.
- Linux users got whatever (probably free) font their distribution provides, for which in all likelihood their fontconfig (rendering settings) is also optimised.
- Those with cleartype etc off previously had fonts that rendered properly or they would not have been using their system with cleartype etc off for all this time.
- Anyone previously using free fonts, on whatever platform, did not have their choices overridden. This also applies to those using dyslexic-friendly and other accessibility-oriented fonts.
- And so on.
Given that no objective and verifiable issues with this were ever provided to explain the need for a shift to specific fonts across all platforms and languages in the first place, this means there should also be no issues with going back.
-I
+1, but to me 'serif' rather than 'sans-serif' for the section headers is nicer. YMMV and can certainly live with sans for section headers
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