1907191 - Date/time column does not use `tnum` feature of a font like Inter

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Paul Menzel]

Attachment: Sample screenshot

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:130.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/130.0

Steps to reproduce:

On Debian sid/unstable, update gsettings-desktop-schemas to 47~alpha-1, which changes the default font to Inter.

Actual results:

The alignment in the date column looks bad when there is a 1 in there.

Expected results:

The alignment should be better. Sebastian Keller mentioned a solution:

that can be fixed on the application side by using the tnum feature of the font for times/dates

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7772#note_2163599

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Inter isn't the only potential UI font with non-fixed-space digits; e.g. on macOS, the UI font also has proportionally-spaced digits, and so the date column shows similar variation in width. Whether this is a problem is basically an aesthetic issue, I guess. It's not like these are columns of numbers that are to be added up, where the variable spacing could introduce a risk of mis-reading, but it still might be considered tidier to have the dates align consistently.

So we should perhaps consider applying font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums here, if we do want them to line up more neatly.

It looks like this would be applicable to several columns: at least Received / Date / Size / Order received.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: screenshot of Date column in Thunderbird on macOS

This compares Thunderbird's current display of the Date column (left) with the result of adding font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums (right) on macOS.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Bug 1907191 - Use tabular numerals in date/numeric columns of the Thunderbird UI. r=Paenglab

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

The above is a strawman patch that should address this issue, assuming it's something we want to change; note that it is currently not tested in an actual build (as I don't have one set up locally), but poking with devtools suggests this should work.

(I don't know if this is at all the correct place to do this; please feel free to steal the patch and adapt it if there's a better/more appropriate way to do this within the thunderbird code.)

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/d2dddd76df54
Use tabular numerals in date/numeric columns of the Thunderbird UI. r=Paenglab