Forum looks bad

[Google_Frog]

I really dislike the font. The letters are too large and wide. There is no enough whitespace within words. It affects the wiki which is really annoying.

[PepeAmpere]

Font is problem, change it. Use standard font, FreeSans is not standard one and does problems on many computers (i tried 5 different ones)

Now I cite that bad font specification:

Code: Select all

font-family:FreeSans,Arial,"DejaVu Sans",sans-serif;

[Beherith]

I for one, welcome our new wider forum overlord. Plus the red is nice on top too.

[jK]

it should look like this:

and it looks similar to that on my smartphone (duno if it really uses FreeSans or Arial there). When it looks differently on a Win98SE, it doesn't matter imo.

I for one, welcome our new wider forum overlord. Plus the red is nice on top too.

:)

[Silentwings]

I like the new forum too. Thanks for doing it :)

[CarRepairer]

Website looks nice but after reading this quote it makes it even more worthwhile!

get on a real computer

This is not a hardware issue for me. It's the only phpbb forum with such ugly font size that I tro- browse.

[Google_Frog]

Font is problem, change it. Use standard font, FreeSans is not standard one and does problems on many computers (i tried 5 different ones)

Now I cite that bad font specification:

Code: Select all

font-family:FreeSans,Arial,"DejaVu Sans",sans-serif;

I have the same font problem with up to date Windows 7 and Firefox. A decent number of people have this problem and every other website I have been to works so there is something broken with this particular website.

[PepeAmpere]

As I said, just dont use "Free Sans". Use any of standard fonts.

[Jools]

As I said, just dont use "Free Sans". Use any of standard fonts.

Use whatever font except Arial :)

[PepeAmpere]

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp

[AF]

Our logo is Arial.

Free Sans and Arial etc are intended to be generic fonts that don't draw attention to themselves, Arial being a derivative of Helvetica with minor differences.

In this case I would suggest the following font stack:

Code: Select all

font-family: 'Open Sans', "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light",  "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
font-weight:300;

Open Sans is a superior font to free sans, is widely used on the web, and has a good track record, with better CDNs and a much larger variety of weights. It is likely your browser has already cached a copy from browsing popular websites.

http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans

Helvetica Neue is a reworking of helvetica with a more structurally unified set of heights and widths. Other changes include improved legibility, heavier punctuation marks, and increased spacing in the numbers.

The light version of the font is a nicer weight and should work better here, falling back to standard Helvetica Neue.

As a fallback, I chose standard helvetica followed by arial. The sans-serif is likely to be arial on a windows machine and helvetica on OS X. On any modern machine Open Sans should be used, and on OS X Helvetica Neue would be the fallback. Lucida Grande acts as an additional fallback

I would suggest the following weights of Open Sans be used:

• Light 300, for front page and feature use and for improving the headings hierarchy
• Normal 400 and Normal 400 italic for body text
• Bold 700 and Bold 700 italic for bolded text

Additional weights are unnecessary, but can be made available when needed for promotional material.

This font stack should be more resilient than the one we currently have, with better typographic handling of things on those browsers with superior type setting capabilities.

[jK]

As I said, just dont use "Free Sans". Use any of standard fonts.

Use whatever font except Arial :)

Verdana sucks hell, it's wide as the %insert bad fat ass joke here%
Also Arial the one that comes most close to FreeSans. Never the less it sucks, it might give decent results for 14px but anything bigger and it looks fat & blocky
FreeSans is something like an improved Arial, I don't want to drop it cause firefox&konqueror fail at otf subpixel/AA rendering when you don't fix global font-config settings (its defaults suck)

Open Sans is a superior font to free sans, is widely used on the web, and has a good track record, with better CDNs and a much larger variety of weights. It is likely your browser has already cached a copy from browsing popular websites.

OpenSans isn't available in my distro. I know Google tries to push it, still duno if it normally is included with chrome or something. Still I hardly think it is better distributed than FreeSans.

[AF]

The only machines and devices I have that include FreeSans are the Ubuntu install on my WIndows machine. I think it troubling that the website is being optimised specifically for linux users while Windows and other operating systems are experiencing font issues as a result.

Freesans also only comes in 2 weights, bold and normal, unlike Arial/Helvetica/OpenSans/etc.

Perhaps you're using a heavier weight of arial than you'd like and choosing a lighter weight would be more appropriate? Or using a better approximation of Helvetica? Arial may have its detractors but it does the job,

Verdana was designed to be a humanist sans serif legible on screens at small resolutions and to be legible in general. There's a TED talk by the guy who designed it for Microsoft that talks about its creation and type setting over the last 50 years. Suffice to say you're probably misusing it to have the complaints you mention.

Different typefaces optimise for different things. There are non-aesthetic design decisions made when setting a typeface.

You may not prefer wider characters in Verdana but they were done quite deliberately. You can see this kind of design decisions in Arial and Helvetica, where the lettering is designed to be similar rather than distinct, more generic, which was the intention.

If Open Sans and Google are not to your taste, there is a huge variety of sans serif humanist typefaces out there to choose from, a lot of them with superior metrics and quality to free sans and the standard arial typeface. You can download the OTF and TTF files for it from Google, and their CDN provides it via webfonts.

[jK]

Perhaps you're using a heavier weight of arial than you'd like and choosing a lighter weight would be more appropriate?

Regular should work and it doesn't. Using a non-default weight level for default text is a bad decision imo.

Verdana was designed to be a humanist sans serif legible on screens at small resolutions and to be legible in general. There's a TED talk by the guy who designed it for Microsoft that talks about its creation and type setting over the last 50 years. Suffice to say you're probably misusing it to have the complaints you mention.

blabla Verdana might have it's usage, still it's one of the `websafe` fonts (there are no such and taking default windows install as default is quite incorrect these days with so many ppl surfing with their smartphones & tablets). And for websites Verdana isn't usable imo.
So from the pool of those websafe fonts, only a minor set is an real option.

If Open Sans and Google are not to your taste, there is a huge variety of sans serif humanist typefaces out there to choose from, a lot of them with superior metrics and quality to free sans and the standard arial typeface. You can download the OTF and TTF files for it from Google, and their CDN provides it via webfonts.

If we include download url, it's no difference to FreeSans. abma disliked it and reverted it, cause it either won't render anything till the font is loaded (1MB can take some time) or it renders with one of the fallback fonts and showing a switch when the final font is loaded.

[AF]

1MB is a lot for a webfont, you needn't grab the whole thing with every weight available!

[PepeAmpere]

I don't want to drop it cause firefox&konqueror fail at otf subpixel/AA rendering when you don't fix global font-config settings (its defaults suck)

jK i respect you in some ways, but in this case your appoach damages many users. Probelms for many, satisfaction for one person and tiny nothing for users of "good" browsers. This is an exemplary example of style of many previous decisions some leaders of this community do, but I hope now everyone can see whos arrogant/ignorant and see value of common sense in any discussion with you and your kind.

I maybe use strong words, but Im not wrong.

Btw, I add Chrome screen to show you its not matter of FF/CQ browser

[AF]

On OS X the current font stack means that the default sans-serif at the end if what's getting used ( helvetica ).

This is what I see in Chrome 35 OS X:

[PicassoCT]

I have no idea what is topic whatsoever, i asume its the usual (resistance against change in genral) and resistance against change thats bad for me in particular + the usual compability issues that are the intertubes.

I made a screenshot to warn of the dangers of recursive threads

[code_man]

Im on debian based linux using ff 35 and the font looks kinda weird, but not all that bad, so it could work for me.
But otherwise id say its a good improvement.

PS: i never tought about it but this font bussiness is serious bullcrap.

[smoth]

Can this be moved to infrastructure with the rest of the web related junk

Pereampere get over the chip on your shoulder plz thx k bye