Thanks for the translation! Could you tell me more about the Cantarell
font, please, and why it is necessary? What does the page look like
without it? What is the problem?
(Resending a plaintext copy manually because K9 defaults to HTML, which the list rejects. Sorry for the duplication.)
Currently, any Cyrillic text that includes any Latin character is displayed using a mix of the designer font and the system font. Fragments with links, usernames, organization names, numbers or punctuation marks become distracting for people with health differences sensitive to such things, such as myself. The designer font stands out a lot from the sans-serif default on every major operating system. Cantarell is a part of GNOME and has similar shapes with a good coverage of my language, so I find it a good fit. In other environments without Cantarell, my patch will have the entire page fall back to the sans-serif chosen in the browser settings, which I personally find preferable to a mix of fonts.
> ...become distracting for people with health differences sensitive to> such things, such as myself. The designer font stands out a lot
Thanks for the explanation, and sorry that I'm only just getting back
to this now. I don't wish to add the `lang` attribute to the `html`
element because that attribute is supposed to describe the entire
document. But in fact, a person with the interface language set to
Ukrainian may be viewing profile pages of people from any country,
writing in any language.
Since the font issue is relevant to the Cyrillic script as a whole
(which can be used for the Bulgarian, Russian, and Ukrainian
languages), I think it would make sense to alter the font used based on
whether the page has a significant proportion of Cyrillic characters.
I can make this change myself, so you don't need to send an updated
patch. I'm just checking with you whether you think it would be a good
idea to do it this way. Do you think this would be good?
I think setting the site font according to
the language configured by the user
(ideally derived from HTTP headers, but
I have a vague guess that it might reduce
privacy) with an attribute such as
data-ui-lang rather than lang, and
hardcoding the list of the languages
supported by the designer font at the UI
translation and testing time, would be
reliable enough.
However, I am interested in testing your
idea and reading your code solution.
Please count all the non-Latin characters,
not only Cyrillic, in both the posts and the
user interface. If the page has a
significant amount (also interested in the
heuristics guessing what amount is
significant) of neither, try sans-serif only.
Thank you. I set up a local server and
confirmed that your changes work.
I really wish you kept the Cantarell
suggestion, because the words are often
too wide with defaults; I chose the font
because it fits well, not just to choose
something. Notice how three different
words in /u/solidaritykitchenkyiv get split
between lines: Солідарнос/ті in the title,
solidaritykitchenky/iv in the link and
допомог/ти in the description. If you
find my font suggestion unacceptable,
please change the column width from
235px to 320px (300px at least).
Okay, let's use Cantarell! Hopefully I can make this change today.
From what I'm reading online, Cantarell is not preinstalled on most
computers, right? In that case, its files should include it in Bibliogram
just like how the stylish font is included.
> Okay, let's use Cantarell! Hopefully I can make this change today.
Thank you. However, this change did not work as expected. The version
you merged into the repository covers too few characters, unlike the
version present in the Debian repository or the GNOME website.
> From what I'm reading online, Cantarell is not preinstalled on most> computers, right? In that case, its files should include it in> Bibliogram just like how the stylish font is included.
In my experience, embedding web fonts into repositories is not very
nice to international users, because it tends to lock them into a
version with a limited character set and no updates.
When I absolutely have to embed a font in the page, for example I
did this in a logo generator for Fridays For Future Ukraine chats,
I configure my scripts to schedule mirroring the font from a
trusted project, such as:
https://static.gnome.org/fonts/Cantarell-Regular.otfhttps://static.gnome.org/fonts/Cantarell-Bold.otf
I understand that while the GNOME build covers my language, it
might similarly exclude people from other countries. To avoid
misdirecting more of your time, I have to ask you to revert the
latest change for now and try customizing the grid width instead.
> I understand that while the GNOME build covers my language, it might> similarly exclude people from other countries. To avoid misdirecting> more of your time, I have to ask you to revert the latest change for> now and try customizing the grid width instead.
Hmmmph, how annoying.
In my latest change I have included the Gnome font files. I can always
undo this later.
Judging by the font glyph viewer at
https://torinak.com/font/lsfont.html?#https://static.gnome.org/fonts/Cantarell-Regular.otf
it seems like the Gnome font file only includes Latin and Cyrillic
scripts.
Still, I figure that this should be preferred over the browser's
default font for the majority of situations. If I receive another
complaint from somebody who uses another script and thinks the font
choice is poor, I can try to find a solution that works for more
scripts.
But I hope this is good enough for now, even if it's not fantastic.
(Oh, and I did increase the left column width slightly a couple of
commits ago. This width was chosen because 6 photos can safely fit
across the screen on a 1920 pixel wide display. I could play with the
sizes again in the future, if necessary.)