Talk:Design/Projects/Improve mobile reading experience

In case you're not already aware, you may want to review Typography refresh, its talk page archives, and associated discussions elsewhere (e.g. wikitech-l).

IIRC, that past attempt got negative feedback over its preference of non-free fonts over free fonts, and negative feedback because font names were being mapped to worse-displaying fonts than generic sans-serif on some systems or were poorly-displaying ancient versions installed by some application.

OTOH, if the target for Minerva really is only mobile devices maybe that makes some of that irrelevant, at least if you remove the pseudo-generic "Helvetica Neue" and the like.

Thanks for your comment, @Anomieǃ

We've been carefully researching this approach, observing learnings from other big platforms. And several Design team members including myself were also aware of the aftermath of the old Typography refresh and why it got such strong feedback. Some of the discussion of free fonts versus non-free fonts seemed taking opposing directions as the readability of “free” fonts like “Liberation Sans” turned out to have negative effects on readability on certain devices/operating system combinations. In this proposed change we rely on system fonts that are similar free (already licensed to owners of the operating system), but provide better readability than generic sans-serif Arial or Helvetica fallbacks. Your point with “Helvetica Neue” is valid and we'll follow-up, it might not have been visible so far as we didn't run into a combination where it actually was the rendered one.

Even though we have clearly done wide ranging testing, we might still find – with our variety of users on different languages and platforms – certain cases where the current approach would be evaluated and possibly amended.

Given that macOS is covered by `-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont`, it seems useful to cut off possible side-effects with adding “Helvetica Neue” to the stack even though the findings from back then (Windows XP specific, HP derivative font or special glyph rendering) might not apply anymore 4 years later.

We've removed “Helvetica Neue” in the finalized patch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue/+/484976/6/minerva.less/minerva.variables.less.

I thought this project was just about mobile? I'm seeing your new font stack on desktop as well.

Comparing https://web.archive.org/web/20190303224908/https://www.wikipedia.org/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190304230329/https://www.wikipedia.org/, I'm now seeing Roboto instead of DejaVu Sans. It doesn't look bad, but Roboto is narrower making it a bit harder to read (and the trend towards grey text doesn't help). If I disable Roboto I get Lato, which seems to be a bit smaller yet, and if I disable Lato too I get Arimo which is slightly wider than Roboto but still narrower than DejaVu Sans.