Something felt uncomfortable today, but I can’t put my finger on it. Just a general feeling as if the letters are less sharp or less clearly separated or something like that.
Guys, for this specific case you really have to say what OS you are using. Otherwise you might be totally talking past each other.
(Font-size didn’t change on any OS, but the font itself changed from Calibri to Gill Sans on Windows. Gill Sans has a slightly smaller x-height so probably looks a bit smaller.)
On Windows the font feels actively unpleasant right away, on Android it’s not quite as bad but feels like I might develop eyestrain if I read comments for a longer time.
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.
Guys, for this specific case you really have to say what OS you are using. Otherwise you might be totally talking past each other.
(Font-size didn’t change on any OS, but the font itself changed from Calibri to Gill Sans on Windows. Gill Sans has a slightly smaller x-height so probably looks a bit smaller.)
I tested it on Android, it’s the same for both Firefox and Chrome. The font looks significantly smaller than the old font, likely due to the smaller x-height you mentioned. Could the font size of the comments be increased a bit so that it appears visually about as large as the old one? Currently I find it too small to read comfortably. (Subjective font size is often different from the standard font size measure. E.g. Verdana appears a lot larger than Arial at the same standard “size”.)
(A general note: some people are short sighted and wear glasses, and the more short-sighted you are, the stronger the glasses contract your field of view to a smaller area. So things that may appear as an acceptable size for people who aren’t particularly short-sighted, may appear too small for more short-sighted people.)
Yeah, using Firefox on both Android and Windows. Font looks terrible on the comments. Too small, and the the letters are too smushed together. I was going to just change it on the client-side, but then noticed other people complaining.
Couldn’t you please just set the comment font to the same as the post font? I would vastly prefer to have it all the same.
You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font. Legibility would be really terrible for that serif font at the small font-size that you want to display comments as. I am confident it would be much worse for the vast majority of users (feel free to try it yourself). You could change both post font and comment font to a sans-serif, but that would get rid of a lot of the character of the site (and I prefer legibility of serif fonts at larger font sizes).
would not want the comment font be the same as the post font [...] the small font-size that you want to display comments as
I had to increase the zoom level by about 20% (from 110% to 130%) after this change to make the comments readable[1]. This made post text too big to the point where I would normally adjust zoom level downward, but I can’t in this case[2], since the comments are on the same site as the posts. Also the lines in both posts and comments are now too long (with greater zoom).
I sit closer to the monitor than standard to avoid need for glasses[3], so long lines have higher angular distance. In practice modern sites usually have a sufficiently narrow column of text in the middle so this is almost never a problem. Before the update, LW line lengths were OK (at 110% zoom). At monitor/window width 1920px, substack’s 728pxseems fine (at default zoom), but LW’s 682px get balooned too wide with 130% zoom.
The point is not that accomodating sitting closer to the monitor is an important use case for a site’s designer, but that somehow the convergent design of most of the web manages to pass this test, so there might be more reasons for that.
Incidentally, the footnote font size is 12.21px, even smaller than the comment font size of 15.08px.
The comment font still doesn’t feel “sharp”, like there’s more anti-aliasing at work. It’s Gill Sans Nova Medium, size 15.08px (130% zoom applies on top of that). OpenSans Regular 18px on RoyalRoad (100% zoom; as an example sans font) doesn’t have this problem. LW post text is fine (at either zoom), Warnock Pro 18.2px. I’m in Firefox on Arch Linux, 1920x1080.
Here’s a zoomed-in screenshot from LW (from 130% zoom in Firefox):
Here’s a zoomed-in screenshot from RoyalRoad (from 100% zoom in Firefox):
Small font-size? No! Same font-size! I don’t want the comments in a smaller font OR a different font! I want it all the same font as the posts, including the same size.
Personally I like the different headspace I’m in for writing posts and comments that the styling gives. One is denser and smaller and less high-stakes, the other is bigger and more presentational, more like a monologue for a large audience.
You want higher content density for comments than for posts, so you need a smaller font size. You could sacrifice content density, but it would really make skimming comment threads a lot worse.
You may want higher density, but I don’t think you can say that I want high density at the expense of legibility.
It takes a lot to make me notice layout, and I rarely notice fonts at all… unless they’re too small. I’m not as young as I used to be. This change made me think I must have zoomed the browser two sizes smaller. The size contrast is so massive that I have to actually zoom the page to read comfortably when I get to the comment section. It’s noticeably annoying, to the point of breaking concentration.
I’ve mostly switched to RSS for Less Wrong[1]. I don’t see your fonts at all any more, unless I click through on an article. The usual reason I click through is to read the comments (occasionally to check out the quick takes and popular comments that don’t show up on RSS). So the comments being inaccessible is doubly bad.
My browser is Firefox on Fedora Linux, and I use a 40 inch 4K monitor (most of whose real estate is wasted by almost every Web site). I usually install most of the available font packages, and it says it’s rendering this text in “Gill Sans Nova Medium”.
My big reason for going to RSS was to mitigate the content prioritization system. I want to skim every headline, or at least every headline over some minimum threshold of “good”. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to look at any old headlines twice to see the new ones. I’m really minimally interested in either the software’s or the other users’ opinions of which material I should want to see. RSS makes it easier to get a simple chronological view; the built-in chronological view is weird and hard to navigate to. I really feel like I’m having to fight the site to see what I want to see.
Just want to chime in with agreement about annoyance over the prioritization of post headlines. One thing in particular that annoys me is that I haven’t figured out how to toggle off ‘seen’ posts showing up. What if I just want to see unread ones?
Also, why can’t I load more at once instead of always having to click ‘load more’?
The “Recommended” tab filters out read posts by default. We never had much demand for showing recently-sorted posts while filtering out only ones you’ve read, but it wouldn’t be very hard to build.
Not sure what you mean by “load more at once”. We could add a whole user setting to allow users to change the number of posts on the frontpage, but done consistently that would produce a ginormous number of user settings for everything, which would be a pain to maintain (not like, overwhelmingly so, but I would be surprised if it was worth the cost).
That doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I’m clearly not the target audience since ‘skimming comment threads’ isn’t a thing I ever want to do. I want to read them, carefully and thoughtfully, like I do posts.
This is, I think, related to how I feel that voting (karma or agreement) should be available only at the bottom of posts and comments, so that people are encouraged to actually read the post/comment before voting. Maybe even placed behind a reading comprehension quiz.
I think knowing the karma and agreement is useful, especially to help me decide how much attention to pay to a piece of content, and I don’t think there’s that much distortion from knowing what others think. (i.e., overall benefits>costs)
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to see the karma and agreement at the top, just that you should only be able to contribute your own opinion at the bottom, after reading and judging for yourself.
You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font.
This… seems straightforwardly false? Every one of GreaterWrong’s eight themes uses a single font for both posts and comments, and it doesn’t cause any problems. (And it’s a different font for each theme!)
(I think it’s quite costly and indeed one of the things I like least about the GW design, but also, I was more talking about a straightforward replacement.
On LW we made a lot of subsequent design choices based on different content density, and the specific fonts we chose are optimized for their respective most commonly used font sizes. I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)
I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)
Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s because of a post body font that wasn’t chosen for suitability for comments also. If you pick, to begin with, a font that works for both, then it’ll work for both.
… of course, if you don’t think that any of the GW themes’ fonts work for both, then never mind, I guess. (But, uh, frankly I find that to be a strange view. But no accounting for taste, etc., so I certainly can’t say it’s wrong, exactly.)
Good point! I went and looked their themes. I prefer LessWrong’s look, except for the comments.
Again, this doesn’t matter much to me since I can customize client-side, I just wanted to let habryka know that some people dislike the new comment font and would prefer the same font and size as the normal post font.
We have done lots of users interviews over the years! Fonts are always polarizing, but people have a strong preference for sans serifs at small font sizes (and people prefer denser comment sections, though it’s reasonably high variance).
(We switched back to shipping Calibri above Gill Sans Nova pending a fix for the horrible rendering on Windows, so if Ubuntu has Calibri, it’ll have reverted back to the previous font.)
Did the font size in comments change? It does seem quite small now...
Yeah it feels uncomfortably small to read to me now
Something felt uncomfortable today, but I can’t put my finger on it. Just a general feeling as if the letters are less sharp or less clearly separated or something like that.
Guys, for this specific case you really have to say what OS you are using. Otherwise you might be totally talking past each other.
(Font-size didn’t change on any OS, but the font itself changed from Calibri to Gill Sans on Windows. Gill Sans has a slightly smaller x-height so probably looks a bit smaller.)
On Windows the font feels actively unpleasant right away, on Android it’s not quite as bad but feels like I might develop eyestrain if I read comments for a longer time.
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.
I tested it on Android, it’s the same for both Firefox and Chrome. The font looks significantly smaller than the old font, likely due to the smaller x-height you mentioned. Could the font size of the comments be increased a bit so that it appears visually about as large as the old one? Currently I find it too small to read comfortably. (Subjective font size is often different from the standard font size measure. E.g. Verdana appears a lot larger than Arial at the same standard “size”.)
(A general note: some people are short sighted and wear glasses, and the more short-sighted you are, the stronger the glasses contract your field of view to a smaller area. So things that may appear as an acceptable size for people who aren’t particularly short-sighted, may appear too small for more short-sighted people.)
Yeah, using Firefox on both Android and Windows. Font looks terrible on the comments. Too small, and the the letters are too smushed together. I was going to just change it on the client-side, but then noticed other people complaining.
Couldn’t you please just set the comment font to the same as the post font? I would vastly prefer to have it all the same.
You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font. Legibility would be really terrible for that serif font at the small font-size that you want to display comments as. I am confident it would be much worse for the vast majority of users (feel free to try it yourself). You could change both post font and comment font to a sans-serif, but that would get rid of a lot of the character of the site (and I prefer legibility of serif fonts at larger font sizes).
I had to increase the zoom level by about 20% (from 110% to 130%) after this change to make the comments readable[1]. This made post text too big to the point where I would normally adjust zoom level downward, but I can’t in this case[2], since the comments are on the same site as the posts. Also the lines in both posts and comments are now too long (with greater zoom).
I sit closer to the monitor than standard to avoid need for glasses[3], so long lines have higher angular distance. In practice modern sites usually have a sufficiently narrow column of text in the middle so this is almost never a problem. Before the update, LW line lengths were OK (at 110% zoom). At monitor/window width 1920px, substack’s 728px seems fine (at default zoom), but LW’s 682px get balooned too wide with 130% zoom.
The point is not that accomodating sitting closer to the monitor is an important use case for a site’s designer, but that somehow the convergent design of most of the web manages to pass this test, so there might be more reasons for that.
Incidentally, the footnote font size is 12.21px, even smaller than the comment font size of 15.08px.
The comment font still doesn’t feel “sharp”, like there’s more anti-aliasing at work. It’s Gill Sans Nova Medium, size 15.08px (130% zoom applies on top of that). OpenSans Regular 18px on RoyalRoad (100% zoom; as an example sans font) doesn’t have this problem. LW post text is fine (at either zoom), Warnock Pro 18.2px. I’m in Firefox on Arch Linux, 1920x1080.
Here’s a zoomed-in screenshot from LW (from 130% zoom in Firefox):
Here’s a zoomed-in screenshot from RoyalRoad (from 100% zoom in Firefox):
I previously never felt compelled to figure out how to automate font change in some places of a site.
That is, with more myopia than I have I would wear glasses, and will less myopia I would put the monitor further back on the desk.
Small font-size? No! Same font-size! I don’t want the comments in a smaller font OR a different font! I want it all the same font as the posts, including the same size.
This looks good to me:
This looks terrible to me:
Personally I like the different headspace I’m in for writing posts and comments that the styling gives. One is denser and smaller and less high-stakes, the other is bigger and more presentational, more like a monologue for a large audience.
You want higher content density for comments than for posts, so you need a smaller font size. You could sacrifice content density, but it would really make skimming comment threads a lot worse.
You may want higher density, but I don’t think you can say that I want high density at the expense of legibility.
It takes a lot to make me notice layout, and I rarely notice fonts at all… unless they’re too small. I’m not as young as I used to be. This change made me think I must have zoomed the browser two sizes smaller. The size contrast is so massive that I have to actually zoom the page to read comfortably when I get to the comment section. It’s noticeably annoying, to the point of breaking concentration.
I’ve mostly switched to RSS for Less Wrong[1]. I don’t see your fonts at all any more, unless I click through on an article. The usual reason I click through is to read the comments (occasionally to check out the quick takes and popular comments that don’t show up on RSS). So the comments being inaccessible is doubly bad.
My browser is Firefox on Fedora Linux, and I use a 40 inch 4K monitor (most of whose real estate is wasted by almost every Web site). I usually install most of the available font packages, and it says it’s rendering this text in “Gill Sans Nova Medium”.
My big reason for going to RSS was to mitigate the content prioritization system. I want to skim every headline, or at least every headline over some minimum threshold of “good”. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to look at any old headlines twice to see the new ones. I’m really minimally interested in either the software’s or the other users’ opinions of which material I should want to see. RSS makes it easier to get a simple chronological view; the built-in chronological view is weird and hard to navigate to. I really feel like I’m having to fight the site to see what I want to see.
Just want to chime in with agreement about annoyance over the prioritization of post headlines. One thing in particular that annoys me is that I haven’t figured out how to toggle off ‘seen’ posts showing up. What if I just want to see unread ones?
Also, why can’t I load more at once instead of always having to click ‘load more’?
The “Recommended” tab filters out read posts by default. We never had much demand for showing recently-sorted posts while filtering out only ones you’ve read, but it wouldn’t be very hard to build.
Not sure what you mean by “load more at once”. We could add a whole user setting to allow users to change the number of posts on the frontpage, but done consistently that would produce a ginormous number of user settings for everything, which would be a pain to maintain (not like, overwhelmingly so, but I would be surprised if it was worth the cost).
That doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I’m clearly not the target audience since ‘skimming comment threads’ isn’t a thing I ever want to do. I want to read them, carefully and thoughtfully, like I do posts.
This is, I think, related to how I feel that voting (karma or agreement) should be available only at the bottom of posts and comments, so that people are encouraged to actually read the post/comment before voting. Maybe even placed behind a reading comprehension quiz.
I think knowing the karma and agreement is useful, especially to help me decide how much attention to pay to a piece of content, and I don’t think there’s that much distortion from knowing what others think. (i.e., overall benefits>costs)
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to see the karma and agreement at the top, just that you should only be able to contribute your own opinion at the bottom, after reading and judging for yourself.
This… seems straightforwardly false? Every one of GreaterWrong’s eight themes uses a single font for both posts and comments, and it doesn’t cause any problems. (And it’s a different font for each theme!)
(I think it’s quite costly and indeed one of the things I like least about the GW design, but also, I was more talking about a straightforward replacement.
On LW we made a lot of subsequent design choices based on different content density, and the specific fonts we chose are optimized for their respective most commonly used font sizes. I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)
Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s because of a post body font that wasn’t chosen for suitability for comments also. If you pick, to begin with, a font that works for both, then it’ll work for both.
… of course, if you don’t think that any of the GW themes’ fonts work for both, then never mind, I guess. (But, uh, frankly I find that to be a strange view. But no accounting for taste, etc., so I certainly can’t say it’s wrong, exactly.)
Sure, I was just responding to this literal quote:
Good point! I went and looked their themes. I prefer LessWrong’s look, except for the comments.
Again, this doesn’t matter much to me since I can customize client-side, I just wanted to let habryka know that some people dislike the new comment font and would prefer the same font and size as the normal post font.
My view on phone (Android, Firefox): https://imgur.com/a/Kt1OILQ
How my client view looks on my computer:
How about running a poll to see what users prefer?
We have done lots of users interviews over the years! Fonts are always polarizing, but people have a strong preference for sans serifs at small font sizes (and people prefer denser comment sections, though it’s reasonably high variance).
I use Google Chrome on Ubuntu Budgie and it does look to me like both the font and the font size changed.
It looks kinda small to me, someone who uses Firefox on Ubuntu.
Update: I have already gotten over it.
(We switched back to shipping Calibri above Gill Sans Nova pending a fix for the horrible rendering on Windows, so if Ubuntu has Calibri, it’ll have reverted back to the previous font.)
I believe I’m seeing Gill Sans? But when I google “Calibri” I see text that looks like it’s in Calibri, so that’s confusing.
Yeah, that’s a google Easter Egg. You can also try “Comic Sans” or “Trebuchet MS”.
Sure, I’m just surprised it could work without me having Calibri installed.
They load it in as a web font (i.e. you load Calibri from their server when you load that search page). We don’t do that on LessWrong