Plausible we might want to revert to Calibri on Windows, but I would like to make Gill Sans work. Having different font metrics on different devices makes a lot of detailed layout work much more annoying.
Curious if you can say more about the nature of discomfort. Also curious whether fellow font optimizer @Said Achmiz has any takes, since he has been helpful here in the past, especially on the “making things render well on Windows” side.
Well, let’s see. Calibri is a humanist sans; Gill Sans is technically also humanist, but more more geometric in design. Geometric sans fonts tend to be less readable when used for body text.
Gill Sans has a lower x-height than Calibri. That (obviously) is the cause of all the “the new font looks smaller” comments.
(A side-by-side comparison of the fonts, for anyone curious, although note that this is Gill Sans MT Pro, not Gill Sans Nova, so the weight [i.e., stroke thickness] will be a bit different than the version that LW now uses.)
Now, as far as font rendering goes… I just looked at the site on my Windows box (adjusting the font stack CSS value to see Gill Sans Nova again, since I see you guys tweaked it to give Calibri priority)… yikes. Yeah, that’s not rendering well at all. Definitely more blurry than Calibri. Maybe something to do with the hinting, I don’t know. (Not really surprising, since Calibri was designed from the beginning to look good on Windows.) And I’ve got a hi-DPI monitor on my Windows machine…
Interestingly, the older version of Gill Sans (seen in the demo on my wiki, linked above) doesn’t have this problem; it renders crisply on Windows. (Note that this is not the flawed, broken-kerning version of the font that comes with Macs!)
I also notice that the comment font size is set to… 15.08px. Seems weird? Bumping it up to 16px improves things a bit, although it’s still not amazing.
If you can switch to the older (but not broken) version of Gill Sans, that’d be my recommendation.
If you can’t… then one option might be to check out one of the many similar fonts to see if perhaps one of them renders better on Windows while still having matching metrics.
Interesting, thanks! Checking an older version of Gill Sans probably wouldn’t have been something would have thought to do, so your help is greatly appreciated.
I’ll experiment some with getting Gill Sans MT Pro.
The new font seems… thicker, somehow? There’s a kind of eye test you do at the optician where they ask you if the letters seem sharper or just thicker (or something), and this font reminds me of that. Like something is wrong with the prescription of my glasses.
The new font also feels noticeably smaller in some way. Maybe it’s the letter height? I lack the vocabulary to properly describe this. At the very least, the question mark looks noticeably weird. And e.g. in “t” and “p”, the upper and lower parts of the respective letter are weirdly tiny.
Incidentally there were also some other differences in the shape and alignment of UI elements (see the annotated screenshot).
Oh, and the hover tooltip for the agreement votes is now bugged; IIRC hovering over the agreement vote number is supposed to give you some extra info just like with karma, but now it just explains what agreement votes are.
Up to a few days ago, the comments looked good on desktop Firefox, Windows 11, zoom level 150%. Now I find them uncomfortable to look at.
Plausible we might want to revert to Calibri on Windows, but I would like to make Gill Sans work. Having different font metrics on different devices makes a lot of detailed layout work much more annoying.
Curious if you can say more about the nature of discomfort. Also curious whether fellow font optimizer @Said Achmiz has any takes, since he has been helpful here in the past, especially on the “making things render well on Windows” side.
Well, let’s see. Calibri is a humanist sans; Gill Sans is technically also humanist, but more more geometric in design. Geometric sans fonts tend to be less readable when used for body text.
Gill Sans has a lower x-height than Calibri. That (obviously) is the cause of all the “the new font looks smaller” comments.
(A side-by-side comparison of the fonts, for anyone curious, although note that this is Gill Sans MT Pro, not Gill Sans Nova, so the weight [i.e., stroke thickness] will be a bit different than the version that LW now uses.)
Now, as far as font rendering goes… I just looked at the site on my Windows box (adjusting the font stack CSS value to see Gill Sans Nova again, since I see you guys tweaked it to give Calibri priority)… yikes. Yeah, that’s not rendering well at all. Definitely more blurry than Calibri. Maybe something to do with the hinting, I don’t know. (Not really surprising, since Calibri was designed from the beginning to look good on Windows.) And I’ve got a hi-DPI monitor on my Windows machine…
Interestingly, the older version of Gill Sans (seen in the demo on my wiki, linked above) doesn’t have this problem; it renders crisply on Windows. (Note that this is not the flawed, broken-kerning version of the font that comes with Macs!)
I also notice that the comment font size is set to… 15.08px. Seems weird? Bumping it up to 16px improves things a bit, although it’s still not amazing.
If you can switch to the older (but not broken) version of Gill Sans, that’d be my recommendation.
If you can’t… then one option might be to check out one of the many similar fonts to see if perhaps one of them renders better on Windows while still having matching metrics.
One sad thing about older versions of Gill Sans: Il1 all look the same. Nova at least distinguishes the 1.
IMO, we should probably move towards system fonts, though I would like to choose something that preserves character a little more.
Interesting, thanks! Checking an older version of Gill Sans probably wouldn’t have been something would have thought to do, so your help is greatly appreciated.
I’ll experiment some with getting Gill Sans MT Pro.
Comparing with this Internet Archive snapshot from Oct 6, both at 150% zoom, both in desktop Firefox in Windows 11: Comparison screenshot, annotated
The new font seems… thicker, somehow? There’s a kind of eye test you do at the optician where they ask you if the letters seem sharper or just thicker (or something), and this font reminds me of that. Like something is wrong with the prescription of my glasses.
The new font also feels noticeably smaller in some way. Maybe it’s the letter height? I lack the vocabulary to properly describe this. At the very least, the question mark looks noticeably weird. And e.g. in “t” and “p”, the upper and lower parts of the respective letter are weirdly tiny.
Incidentally there were also some other differences in the shape and alignment of UI elements (see the annotated screenshot).
Oh, and the hover tooltip for the agreement votes is now bugged; IIRC hovering over the agreement vote number is supposed to give you some extra info just like with karma, but now it just explains what agreement votes are.