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Maniphest T65686

Effective font size is lower in Firefox/Iceweasel after typography refresh
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Description

On my system, with Iceweasel (Firefox) 24.3.0, the effective body font size decreased. This appears to be due to the change in effective body font from DejaVu Sans to Nimbus Sans L. It seems the font family change means it's actually smaller despite the slight em bump.

I'm not sure what a feasible solution to this is, but I'm putting it here for tracking.

I'll attach screenshots from English Wikipedia, but the issue is also present in core (I compared wmf/1.23wmf19 to master (768c1872435a94ec936c982dd72cb0074b7ea6fc to verify it was present in core itself).

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

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bz63686

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Event Timeline

• bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 3:24 AM
• bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-User-Interface.
• bzimport set Reference to bz63686.
• bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
• Mattflaschen-WMF created this task.Apr 8 2014, 5:36 PM
• Mattflaschen-WMF added a comment.Apr 8 2014, 5:37 PM

Created attachment 15052
English WIkipedia screenshot showing old fonts (2013-08-02)

Attached:

Static-Crash_Beta_not_appearing_as_superscript.png (1×1 px, 253 KB)

• Mattflaschen-WMF added a comment.Apr 8 2014, 5:42 PM

Created attachment 15053
English WIkipedia screenshot showing new fonts with smaller effective size (2014-04-08)

Attached:

Static-Crash_Iceweasel_Firefox_24.3.0_with_typography_refresh_uncropped.png (1×1 px, 252 KB)

• bzimport added a comment.Apr 8 2014, 5:58 PM

swalling wrote:

Yes, Nimbus is the intended new font here.

The tradeoffs here are not obvious I think. Nimbus might end up a bit smaller, but the x-height is improved, which may on balance improve readability.

I'd be interested to see what the Chrome experience is too, since on Linux they tend to render slightly differently.

Jared, thoughts?

• Jaredzimmerman-WMF added a comment.Apr 8 2014, 6:36 PM

subjectively I think the Nimbus font is easier to read because of the greater difference i x-height to ascender height.

• bzimport added a comment.Apr 10 2014, 11:03 PM

swalling wrote:

Per Jared's agreement that the advantage of Nimbus's improved x-height is worth it.

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