Last modified: 2014-06-17 18:52:50 UTC
Some people are reporting that kerning of Nimbus Sans L could be improved. Originally reported by Brian Wolff at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-April/075909.html
I did some testing myself in Firefox and Chrome, and I am not really seeing a major issue to be honest. (See attached screenshots).
Decided to upload screenshots to Commons instead. They're at... [[commons:File:Screenshot of MediaWiki in Chrome with new typography.png]] [[commons:File:Wikipedia Linux screenshot new typography in Firefox.png]] Remember that, if you were getting DejaVu Sans before, this is going to look smaller in some respects. We talked about this in bug 63686 as well. DejaVu is a humanist san-serif with much wider appearance to the eye, but vertical x-height is more uniform in a Helvetica-like sans such as Nimbus. This gives us more consistent appearance and readability for large text blocks, which is why it was chosen.
Created attachment 15082 [details] Screenshot
The additional screenshot I attached is from Chrome on Linux, looking at the same caption Brian reported on. I do not see the same kerning problem he did. Is this potentially browser-specific?
As I said in a follow up email, the issue is more pronounced in Firefox. Do you not see it in Firefox?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typo-refresh-kerning-wn.png I measured both the fake kerning space and the real space. They were both exactly 3 pixels
Oddly enough, chrome on the exact same computer seems to select arial over nimbus (which looks significantly better)
(In reply to Bawolff (Brian Wolff) from comment #7) > Oddly enough, chrome on the exact same computer seems to select arial over > nimbus (which looks significantly better) I assume you downloaded Arial as part of a Windows font package? (Not sure what distro of Linux you are on, but this is somewhat common among Ubuntu users it seems.)
I have it. Possibly from wine. Or some other package i installed over the years. Distro is debian
We won't be overwriting the kerning to the font, as that would likely cause more issues than it resolves.
