GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 643375
font looks bad on Windows
Last modified: 2014-01-26 12:33:42 UTC
I reported this on twitter [1] a month ago and got a response [2], but the font used on www.gnome3.org still looks as bad. So here's a proper bug report. 1. http://twitter.com/#!/leif81/status/30463649269153793 2. http://twitter.com/#!/gnome/status/30565991234674688 Steps to reproduce: 1. On Windows 7 with Firefox 4.0b10 or Chrome 9.0.597.98 navigate to www.gnome3.org 2. On Fedora 14 with same browser and versions navigate to www.gnome3.org Expected results: Fonts to look about the same. Actual results: The font in use looks very bad when viewed from Windows 7. This is isolated to www.gnome3.org. The font in use on www.gnome.org looks fine on both Windows and Fedora.
Created attachment 182003 [details] ww.gnome3.org viewed from Win7
Created attachment 182004 [details] www.gnome3.org viewed from Fedora 14 Fonts look good here.
It would appear whatever font choices were used on gnome3.org are now also in use on gnome.org too. The fonts appear terribly aliased when viewed from Chrome 14 on Windows. Interestingly they look fine now in Firefox (7) and IE (9).
I've seen this too. While we now redirect gnome3.org to gnome.org, the issue about gnome.org remains. These are the fonts we currently use on gnome.org: Cantarell,'Droid Sans',Ubuntu,'DejaVu Sans',Arial, sans-serif As neither, Cantarell, Droid Sans, Ubuntu or DejaVu exists normally on a Windows system, both Arial and sans-serif does. I'll try and figure this out when I have access to my Widows machine tomorrow.
Setting the importance to High, as I've noticed from the webstats that a lot of our visitors are on Windows systems.
Turning on Cantarell did the trick. Might be an issue with hinting of that font. Three fixes I can think of: 1. Put Arial before Cantarell 2. Fix Cantarell (hard?) 3. Detect browser OS (with javascript somehow?) and feed the correct font based on that.
Did option 3. Fixed in Master (and therefore deployed live on www.gnome.org already) http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-web-www/commit/?id=7dabd5bad9ea1b3cce1054564bf69c74e0642ed4 Thanks for the bug report, and please reopen if the issue remains!
I found the bad font in use still on this page: i.e. http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.4/
It seems all of http://library.gnome.org is using the bad font still.
http://developer.gnome.org looks like it has the same font issue.
Changing component then. Do you happen to know what the difference is? I.e. why it looks good on www.gnome.org and bad on library.gnome.org?
Updating the bug title for accuracy.
The problem shows up with Windows XP as well, both in Chrome and in Firefox. The urls with faulty fonts do not have a body with a class attribute "win", whereas the fixed urls have this class attribute. Attached, there is a before and after on http://library.gnome.org where once-faulty font is highlighted and then fixed by adding this attribute. Adding the "win" class attribute to the other faulty pages may fix this problem. According to a previous comment, the "win" is supposed to be applied to the body through some javascript, but it seems that this is not happening to the pages with problems, at least in Chrome and Firefox (I have not tested IE). Maybe someone can investigate why the "win" class attribute is not being added automatically by the javascript.
Created attachment 240860 [details] http://library.gnome.org/ with faulty font
Created attachment 240861 [details] http://library.gnome.org/ with "win" fixing font
Found the javascript: on www.gnome.org there is a .js file called "template.js" and in it, a few lines that determines the operating system and applies the appropriate class attribute: // Get OS var match = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().match(/(win|mac|linux)/); if (match) { $('body').addClass(match[0]); } This script is not present on library.gnome.org or any of the other urls with font problems. If these few lines are applied to the other sites, the problem should fix itself.
Thanks for looking into this, and sorry for the delay. It will be fixed next time the site gets rebuilt. commit b7361dfdd1819444cb5d5e439a4a9307d9f95f18 Author: Frédéric Péters <fpeters@0d.be> Date: Sun Jan 26 12:32:16 2014 +0000 add js snippet to add operating system class to <body> This is an extract from www.gnome.org template.js script. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643375