This. Let's go back to what we *know* worked.

-Chad
On Apr 7, 2014 1:52 PM, "Isarra Yos" <[email protected]> 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
>> 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&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
>>
>
> 5) 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
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