1165989 - Problems with Serbian Cyrilic font width

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect)

Description

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

Attachment: cyrl-latn.png

Hi, I'm the main Serbian localizer for Firefox products.
I maintain Serbian Cyrillic (sr-Cyrl) and Serbian Latin (sr-Latn) repos.

As new versions of Firefox OS come out and as design keeps changing there is less and less space to fit our localizations especially the header strings.

In attachments you can see the difference between cyrl and latn.
Cyrillic font is 8% wider and that is the problem to 9/10 Serbian l10n bugs (Latin version is rarely affacted).


Can we use smaller cyrillic font size or make it more narrow?
Thanks!

Comment 1

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

Attachment: cyrl-latn-Header.jpg

Example where Latin fits perfectly but Chyrillic truncated

Comment 2

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - OOO]]

Adding FirefoxOS UX team on this, for consideration in future versions. Also, not sure if this is under the right component, so feel free to move.
Thanks!

Comment 3

[Stephany Wilkes]

Flagging Patryk on fonts.

Comment 4

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Hey Vanja, so looks like the only short term solution would be to shrink the system font a few pixels when the user selects cyrillic. 

Longer terms solutions would be as follows:
1. Get a narrow / condensed version of Fira (its on our road map pending funding approval)
2. If you could give us 5-10 phrases that fit in English but are too long in Cyrillic that would be great, that way we can make sure they work in our upcoming designs.

Comment 5

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

(In reply to Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX from comment #4)
> Hey Vanja, so looks like the only short term solution would be to shrink the
> system font a few pixels when the user selects cyrillic. 

Hey Patryk, this would be excellent :) Lets do this.

For testing I will suggest that we fallow steps in u bug 1164787
(attachment cyrl-latn-Header.jpg in this bug)
We can see that Serbian Latin (same font as English) fits perfectly but Serbian Cyrillic is missing 2 characters. 


> Longer terms solutions would be as follows:
> 1. Get a narrow / condensed version of Fira (its on our road map pending
> funding approval)
> 2. If you could give us 5-10 phrases that fit in English but are too long in
> Cyrillic that would be great, that way we can make sure they work in our
> upcoming designs.

Can you please explain why you need phrases that fit in English but are long in Cyrillic?? 
As far as I can see some phrases when translated in Serbian Cyrillic are shorter and some are longer (number of caracters). 
Atleast to me it makes more since to compare Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic (we have over 10 bugs from 2.2 where cyrillic was truncated and latin fas fine).


Anyway lets try short term solution first. I think if we manage to reduce font width of Serbian Cyrillic to be similar to Serbian Latin version this problem should be fixed (we rarely have problems with Serbian latin font).

Thanks!

Comment 6

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Hey rather than arbitrary shrinking the header text, don't we have a feature that will shrink the text to a a specified size to make it fit, if the text gets too small ie... below 6pt then it would add an ellipsis. If we don't have this feature now is a perfect time to implement it since less people are busy.

> Can you please explain why you need phrases that fit in English but are long in Cyrillic?? 
> As far as I can see some phrases when translated in Serbian Cyrillic are shorter and some are longer 
> (number of caracters). 

It would be good to make sure we leave enough space, consider the text in our design. But perhaps its not as important if we get the top feature to work.

Comment 7

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

> Hey rather than arbitrary shrinking the header text, don't we have a feature
> that will shrink the text to a a specified size to make it fit, if the text
> gets too small ie... below 6pt then it would add an ellipsis. If we don't
> have this feature now is a perfect time to implement it since less people
> are busy.

Hey, I'm not a UX developer so I have no idea if we have a feature like that. 
Please ask someone who does.

In general the idea is great and it's fine by me to add something like that :)

Comment 8

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

OK so I doubled checked and yes in fact we do have dynamically shrinking text in header from 23px down to 17px. We can modify the component a little to go down to 15px but I really wouldn't want to go below that. I believe this feature will also be added to the other web components seen in the newer builds. 

So perhaps for now lets change the minimum character size in the header to 15px, see if that fixes that header issues.

Comment 9

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

Sounds good to me, please do that.
Thanks

Comment 10

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Hey Pavel, can you reduce the header web components minimum text size to 15px and see if the it fixes the problem with the Cyrillic translation? Thanks!

Comment 11

[Pavel Ivanov [:ivanovpavel][:pivanov] UX]

Attachment: patch for master

Comment 12

[Pavel Ivanov [:ivanovpavel][:pivanov] UX]

Attachment: Shot from Device

Yep.
15px fix this issue.

Comment 13

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Great looks good!

Comment 14

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

We have to be careful here. This patch will have an impact on all apps in Gaia in every locale.

Comment 15

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

Would this suggestions [1] work for you guys?

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161364#c29

Comment 16

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

Comment on attachment 8608405 [details] [review]
patch for master

- Tests broken. 
- We may provide a way to override the default min-font-size on a per component basis. On the grounds that a single default won't ever work for everyone.

Comment 17

[Pavel Ivanov [:ivanovpavel][:pivanov] UX]

+1 for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161364#c29

Comment 18

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

Can we please try 16px instead of 15 ? This was the value we used in 2.1. 15px is _really_ small.

Comment 19

[Pavel Ivanov [:ivanovpavel][:pivanov] UX]

I tried with 16px but in this case does not work :( because we have the right button with more symbols

Comment 20

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

In that case I don't think the right solution is to reduce to 15px but to either fix the translation or the right button... :/

Comment 21

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

(In reply to Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO May 8th -> May 17th) from comment #20)
> In that case I don't think the right solution is to reduce to 15px but to
> either fix the translation or the right button... :/

Agree with Julien, not sure we should go below 16px. Is it too late to alter the string?

Comment 22

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - OOO]]

FWIW: we're not talking about just 1 string here. We're talking about size of Serbian cyrillic font across the entire UI, that causes truncation in many places.
Vanja has already addressed all the bugs where he could reduce his strings. I don't think there's much more he can do for the rest.

Comment 23

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

It also comes down to being super aggressive with our translations ie.
"Dodaj na pocetni ekran" translates to "Add to Home Screen" perhaps we can just say "Add" or "Dodaj", they header text is really meant as a reference point in the navigation its really not supposed to be there to give explicit instructions on what to do. Ideally the header text is only 1 word, maybe 2 at most. 

On some other very popular OS' if the text is too long they just remove it.

Comment 24

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Comment on attachment 8608408 [details]
Shot from Device

I suggest we don't touch the sizing as Wilson says it breaks some tests. And also how would this impact other languages like Arabic or Chinese, it may makes the entire header illegible. 

If we can contain this just to Cyrillic, I'd be okay with it. But if we can't then the only option is more aggressive translation.

Comment 25

[Vanja Tumbas [:civas]]

Hi all, please also check bug 1169571
Fourth comment from it clearly shows how big problem cyrillic font is.
Thanks!

Comment 26

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

Do we have other available fonts for cyrillic that would be closer to the latin measurements ?

Comment 27

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - OOO]]

[Blocking Requested - why for this release]:

Seems like this didn't get the traction needed before code complete for 2.2. Nominating for 3.0 to get this up on radar for upcoming releases

Comment 28

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Cyrillic is not going to be the only problematic language, we'll need to get a condensed font created in combination a more localization sensitive UX, we're still packing too many words into the header.

Comment 29

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on