Revisit bundled font
Closed this issue · 17 comments
Feedback from AMO:
the bundled font change is jarring, I'd much rather use a font that is consistent with my system. The "a" used to have a hat (not round) and the characters used to have smaller proportions, for example.
We can easily fix the "a" to have a hat again but I wonder if we should make the bundled font opt-out?
Yes, tbh I don't like the idea of bundled font either. The new look makes me feel like although my computer is running Windows the extension popup is running Mac, which is a very weird feeling. I even prefer occasionally encountering an incorrectly displayed character over having an inconsistent view between the popup and system, because the former only occurs, well, occasionally, while the latter is always.
Thanks for the feedback! That's good to hear. I've posted a Twitter poll just to try to get a bit more feedback: https://x.com/10tenstudy/status/1797848455479779828
Can you put in an option to turn it off or change it to something else?
It's really annoying to parse the new font.
Can you put in an option to turn it off or change it to something else?
It's really annoying to parse the new font.
Sure, we'll do something about this. I didn't realize how much people would dislike it. I'm still trying to gauge if it's better to add an option or just remove it altogether.
I personally like the font, think it's visually quite pleasing and would continue to use it even when optional, but I also share @SaltfishAmi's concern that the popup doesn't feel native anymore. For me it feels very linuxy, running it on macOS.
I would appreciate an option to switch back to the system/default font.
The new bundled font is fine enough, but I prefer the one I had before.
Comparing some different options on Windows 11:
Unfortunately my system is using Japanese so there's no actually much English text to compare there.
Comparing some different options on Windows 11:
[image]
I don't think the Arial one actually looks like Arial.
The Meiryo one (which is default on my system) matches well with Segoe UI (English) and Microsoft YaHei UI (Chinese) on my machine. The other fonts are too fine while Meiryo has a good degree of roughness on my non-high-resolution monitor.
This time again with English locale and rendered from Chrome:
On my computer (windows 11), the lowercase L in Arial is a straight line.
Comparing some different options on Windows 11:
[image]I don't think the Arial one actually looks like Arial.
It should be. I tried hard coding to Arial (instead of sans-serif) and got back the same result so I'm pretty sure it's Arial.
The Meiryo one (which is default on my system) matches well with Segoe UI (English) and Microsoft YaHei UI (Chinese) on my machine. The other fonts are too fine while Meiryo has a good degree of roughness on my non-high-resolution monitor.
We were previously specifying Meiryo, sans-serif so that Windows users would get Meiryo if there system had it but Mac users would end up with Helvetica.
I think what you're telling me is that we probably want an option to revert to the previous Meiryo, sans-serif behavior as opposed to an option to "use the system default" (i.e. just sans-serif).
On my computer (windows 11), the lowercase L in Arial is a straight line.
Oh, that's because we're specifying various font features: 'calt', 'case', 'cv01', 'cv03', 'cv04', 'cv11', 'ss03'. That's also why Arial has a single-story "a" in that screenshot. Without the font features it looks like:
Why is the font features specified? Any particular reason?
Why is the font features specified? Any particular reason?
They are specific to the Inter font we were using specifying things like round quotes (see https://rsms.me/inter/#features) but it turns out 'ss03' in particular applies to Arial and tweaks a number of things like the single-story "a" and the curled "l". We should drop those feature settings when we're not using Inter.
Judging by comments here and the Twitter poll, it seems like enough people like the new font that it's probably worth keeping in some form. My current thinking is to introduce an option to switch between:
- Bundled fonts, i.e. 1.19 behavior
- System fonts meaning "Meiryo, sans-serif", i.e. 1.18 behavior
I think I'll make the bundled fonts the default option.
I hope to implement this in the next few days and release a new version soon (including a fix for #1802 at the same time if we can work out what's going on there). There's a bit of complexity to it since I'd like to make sure the bundled fonts don't get defined in the content script when they're not used since browsers may pre-emptively load those resources.
I don't have Twitter and so cannot vote in the poll, but FWIW I quite like the new font.
I don't have Twitter and so cannot vote in the poll, but FWIW I quite like the new font.
Thanks @StarScape! I've added an option for now which will default to using the new font. Just waiting to fix #1802 before releasing the new version.