1460709 - Fonts are extremely thin

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: Webapp, task, P5)

Description

[Adolfo Jayme]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/23/internet-is-becoming-unreadable-because-of-a-trend-towards-light/

↑ That horrible trend is caused mainly because macOS, by default, does *stem darkening*, which makes ridiculously thin fonts fatter so as to be readable.

FreeType doesn’t do stem darkening (Windows doesn’t either, but Windows rendering is so blocky it doesn’t matter), so if you install Segoe UI in your Ubuntu, for example, you’ll find tiny, unreadable text. [1] [2]

If you study a bit of typography, you’ll know that thin weights are intended to be used at display sizes, not in body copy.

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/554953/39811335-f36adfaa-534d-11e8-9407-a2a0a7814e78.png
[2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/554953/39811434-4b916992-534e-11e8-8c26-a4792f0645a5.png

Comment 1

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

(In reply to Adolfo Jayme from comment #0)
> FreeType doesn’t do stem darkening (Windows doesn’t either, but Windows
> rendering is so blocky it doesn’t matter), so if you install Segoe UI in
> your Ubuntu, for example, you’ll find tiny, unreadable text. [1] [2]

As I mentioned in [1], I'm unable to replicate this on an Ubuntu VM, nor can our other developers who use Linux as their main workstation replicate this.

I tried installing the Segoe UI font as mentioned, and got [2] and [3]. They're thinner than my original screenshots, but barely, and are not as thin as the screenshots you've presented. Do you have any other customizations that could be causing this? If you're familiar with the devtools and can use the inspector to determine which exact font is being used on your system, that would also be very helpful.

> If you study a bit of typography, you’ll know that thin weights are intended
> to be used at display sizes, not in body copy.

I appreciate that you're reporting this problem, but you've twice now implied either incompetence or that we're intentionally choosing an unreadable font weight, when, based on our own testing, this is clearly a problem with how we're handling certain configurations. Please refer to the Community Participation Guidelines[4] in the future when reporting issues, and understand that people who choose not to follow those guidelines will not be allowed to keep participating.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/socorro/pull/4402#issuecomment-387812866
[2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/193106/39891240-e28f9dce-5451-11e8-97aa-24315c33e00a.png
[3] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/193106/39891245-e5722cc8-5451-11e8-82b8-0ee4e05ffb4d.png
[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/

Comment 2

[Adolfo Jayme]

> I tried installing the Segoe UI font as mentioned, and got [2] and [3].

Try installing all weights of Segoe UI, not just the regular. Screenshot [3] gives it away: the renderer is faking the bold.

I have not customized neither FreeType nor fontconfig.

Comment 3

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I'd welcome a PR from someone that fixes this issue and still works with the Photon style guidelines. I'm not going to get to this any time soon.

Comment 4

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

We ended up ditching Fira, so I'm going to mark this as FIXED.