Ask Ubuntu General Room

C.S.Cameron

8:47 AM

@nan Answer looked great to me and on-topic.

@Zanna Thanks for undeleting the post, it looks on-topic to me and does not mention 16.04 once. Your editing does make it look even better. 8D

terdon

Wow. The bold on AU looks really really ugly on my machine.

Is that what it looks like to others as well or does it look better on Ubuntu?

BeastOfCaerbannog

9:12 AM

@terdon This is how it looks to me.

It doesn't look too bad in my opinion.

I have a problem in U&L though. It seems that the fonts in the titles of the homepage don't use antialiasing.

Zanna

@terdon hmm what font is that?

I'm curious about what people are seeing on various Linuxes

on my Lubuntu system the code looks great in Cascadia but on Windows it seems to look a bit overly bold

terdon

10:07 AM

@BeastOfCaerbannog Yeah, that looks a bit better. Still waaaaaaaay too much bold for me, I find that very hard to read, but better than what I get on my screen.

@Zanna Dunno. I think SE are using some sort of Ubuntu font by default and I don't have that on my Arch.

Levente

10:41 AM

@Zanna This is from stock Ubuntu 20.04.2 with Gnome 3.36 desktop: i.stack.imgur.com/Wab6d.png

terdon

I get the same for the code blocks: way too small :(

Levente

10:56 AM

Here is how to find what actual font **Firefox** used to render given text:
--> 1.) right-click a piece of text and in the context menu choose "Inspect",
--> 2.) under the "Inspector" main tab, find the "Fonts" sub-tab (it's in the _right_ column of the inspector panel)

Look for it in the bottom right corner of this screenshot: i.stack.imgur.com/12gYm.png

terdon

@Levente Nice! Thanks!

Zanna

@terdon yes Ubuntu font is what I get - presumably you would too if you installed it. In firefox (not sure for other browsers) and if you right click somewhere on the text and click Inspect you can see what font it is. There were a bunch of comments asking about non-Ubuntu Linuxes on the new fonts post and Aaron said they would definitely be willing to add more fonts to the stack for other Linuxes, so if your system has a nice font you'd like to see you could request it

terdon

I can't see it in chromium, unfortunately, looks like I need to track down the css, but I do see it in firefox. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) firefox renders it much better, it's chromium that has it ugly

Zanna

I didn't see anyone writing an answer to request particular fonts for other Linuxes

terdon

@Zanna eh, probably not worth catering to Arch users. We're a pretty small bunch.

Zanna

11:05 AM

@terdon you might want to install Cascadia font - Cascadia looks great to me (it's a free software font)

terdon

Firefox uses Cantarell, which looks fine.

Zanna

@terdon well there might be many Linuxes with nice modern fonts in common, other than Ubuntu font

@terdon for code?

I'm not familiar with that font

terdon

@Zanna no, the bold bits that are way too huge for me

2 hours ago, by terdon

Zanna

I installed Cascadia because Ubuntu mono is way too small and narrow for code imho

@terdon yeah the bold looks weirdly a pt or 2 bigger D:

terdon

yeah.

Levente

11:08 AM

@Zanna I think it's pretty pointless to keep adding new fonts in the stylesheet's font-stack;
--> Typography can be a cumbersome job with a lot of tweaking; just throwing in new fonts might not solve the issue.
--> I think the most economic solution for SE could be _adding a checkbox_ in the user profile:
--> [ / ] "Use legacy font stacks"
--> then they could keep switching it over with a little piece of javascript...

Zanna

well... my contention would be why would you want to use crappy old fonts like Arial instead of a nice modern font? but I realise people don't agree

at this point they've rolled out a change and this is the time to tweak it

terdon

Because the "crappy" one looked absolutely fine and the "modern" one looks crappy?

Zanna

personally, I'd infinitely prefer getting the issues with the change ironed out to going back to the old fonts

@terdon I don't think your system is using a "modern" font :D

I mean, they haven't configured a font for your system

anyway, aren't you using the Cinnamon DE? Very popular isn't it?

Levente

The issue is that:
--> the newly chosen ones are UI (user interface) fonts: _optimized for buttons and menus_ (and also for branding)
--> the old font-stack consisted of _reading-optimized_ fonts, and even if they were older, still outperformed any UI type fonts — newer or not.

terdon

@Zanna yes, I am, but I don't know if that's relevant. Might be, now that I think of it, but in the browser, the font choice should be down to the CSS of each page.

Zanna

11:17 AM

@terdon yeah but the fallbacks in the CSS, if you don't have the fonts specified, will pick fonts configured as, like, the default system font, or default sans-serif font etc on your system, I think

Levente

@Zanna btw. even if it was called "Arial" in the CSS, chances are that your browser (in the lack of Arial installed on the system) (assuming you are on Linux), had rendered those texts in "Liberation Sans".
--> So, practically, the poor reputation of "Arial" is not relevant.

Zanna

@Levente Liberation Sans and DejaVu Sans were in the stack

(the old stack)

@Levente the poor reputation of Arial is relevant for users who have Arial, no? Like, most Windows users?

terdon

All I know is that SE sites used to look nice, clean and easy to read and now look none of the above.

Another case of it ain't broke, so let's fix it.

Levente

@Zanna yeah but I thought that our primary concern now is our Linux-platform experience

Zanna

@Levente yeah that's a fair point - I don't really see the logic of picking the system UI fonts! But I think all the new fonts are better than all the old fonts :D

@Levente well I'm talking about 2 things here - terdon's particular crappy non-Ubuntu Linux experience, and other folks' experiences generally

(sorry in case that came across wrong - I meant that terdon's experience is crappy, not that his Linux is crappy!)

Journeyman Geek

11:26 AM

@terdon with the promise of fixes later

Levente

The crappy thing is that SE design dept apparently does not have too many Ubuntu users on the team, and rolled out a change whose effect they did not study / properly consider / A/B test before rollout.
--> in other words they had behaved like amateurs :)
--> Btw. there are windows people also complaining in the comments here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364048/908360

Zanna

oh yeah the complaints don't seem to be restricted to any particular OS haha

terdon

@Zanna hahahaha, don't worry, that's how I read it :)

And I wouldn't mind if you thought my Linux is crappy either, I'm no fanboi.

@Levente The whole company is very Windows-centric. I think the founders were Windows developers so they actually honestly believe it is a decent operating system! :P

Zanna

@terdon lol

Levente

11:42 AM

@terdon @Zanna I think I have found the font @terdon sees on Arch: it seems to me it's "DejaVu Sans": i.stack.imgur.com/4n6Kv.png

The takeaway being: on Linuxes, a very strong contender for readability remains "Liberation Sans".

Zanna

@terdon well FWIW I think Arch is great (and their amazing documentation helps us all) and I like Cinnamon too (my dad uses it on Mint)

@Levente hmm think you're right

Levente

And by the way, indeed, it is one of Linux's shortcomings: the comparably low number of finely-polished fonts.
--> That's what we get when fonts are developed in one's free time... good, usable, but behind world-class...

Journeyman Geek

12:02 PM

lol

@Levente actually also a lot of NIH

Zanna

I guess DejaVu Sans is the sans-serif fallback on terdon's system

Journeyman Geek

Was mucking about with stylescripts and - both the fonts there (Source Sans Pro Regular and Source Code Pro) are open source

@terdon Segoe UI is giving me trouble actually

Zanna

@JourneymanGeek looks nice, especially in the table

Journeyman Geek

(That said, most people arn't going to use a stylesheet, or muck around with their default font or...)

Heck, even install fonts

Zanna

@JourneymanGeek BTW isn't that font narrower than Segoe? Like, more "crowded"?

Journeyman Geek

12:15 PM

@Zanna wierdly, its more readable even then

I'd like a slightly bigger font size but...

No idea how to do that. I just modified a stylescript someone else put up :D

Zanna

@JourneymanGeek I guess readability is complex

Journeyman Geek

Yup

This font has a few 'nice' things - distinct Zero and O b and d are not mirrors of each other...

Zanna

the Source fonts do look similar to Segoe to me. IDK about San Francisco, never seen it afaik

whereas Ubuntu font is very distinctive

Levente

@JourneymanGeek What's "NIH"?

Ah, Not Invented Here...
--> So your argument is: we don't need better ones developed;
--> Instead, we just need to download better ones;
--> Then, why not include them in the default install, even?
--> Well, how about _licensing_ them? (That's an everpresent challenge)
--> In this light; is it still NIH?

Journeyman Geek

@Levente There's good open source ones ;)

Levente

12:24 PM

then they should be part of the default install...
--> Or at least the subject of a wiki page or other kind of guide with elevated visibility
--> (but even then, that will lead to fragmentation, the kind that website designers would have a hard time accommodating)

Zanna

@terdon personally the more I look at the site in Ubuntu font the more I like it. You might wanna try installing Ubuntu font for a while to see if you find it an improvement

Journeyman Geek

16 mins ago, by Journeyman Geek

(That said, most people arn't going to use a stylesheet, or muck around with their default font or...)

:D

@Levente Oh, I tend to muck around fonts cause I'm dyslexic and often set up my environments to be better for me

Levente

12:49 PM

I think web-designers will not go into efforts to find out more about and to cater for customized / personalized OS instances; especially considering that the users of these (desktop) Linuxes are amounting to a lower single digit percentage of all users.
--> So, in this context, we can only hope that SE designers come up with an updated solution that is tailored at which fonts Linuxes, and especially, Ubuntu tends to install by default.

Journeyman Geek

@Levente which would be having a web font

and I'm not too sure why they're unwilling to do that

That way you don't need to worry what font the OS has

Levente

@JourneymanGeek In this comment budget (page weight in kilobytes) is named as the reason: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364048/…

A fellow designer! 👋 We have opted to not load webfonts at our scale. Stack Overflow, despite being one of the top 50 visited websites, is fast and we'd like to keep it that way. Everything's a budget, right? We download CSS, JavaScript, and maybe eventually, fonts. We'd have to delete a lot of legacy CSS before we have the budget for fonts. For now, this allows us to modernize our typefaces. — Aaron Shekey ♦ May 6 at 15:57

Journeyman Geek

sigh

nan

3:19 PM

Hello, many thanks Zanna for your edition and many thanks for the comments from the other IT pros. Just fyi... I have done copy from a writer document with the Liberation Serif (12) to gedit and then to askubuntu. Probably I copied some part of it directly from writer...

terdon

4:06 PM

@Levente well, SE users will have a far, far higher proportion of Linux users than most communities: SE is still heavily programmer/tech centric and there is a very significant proportion of tech folks who use Linux. So they have a strong incentive to make it look good in at least Ubuntu (which I believe they have done).

I don't think it's reasonable of me to expect them to put effort into making it lookn good in a relatively niche system like Arch.

I'm just annoyed 'cause it used to look fine and for some reason they went and broke it.

Levente

4:36 PM

yesterday, by Levente

This is the font stack they seem to have used:
system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Ubuntu", "Roboto", "Noto Sans", "Droid Sans", sans-serif

@terdon They could fix it (for all of us) as easily as putting "Liberation Sans" into the font-stack-defining string above.

They have 3 places to do that, through 3 CSS variables:
`--theme-question-body-font-family`
`--theme-body-font-family`
`--ff-sans`
Preferably they should do that with the last one, the most global one in scope.

terdon

@Levente Have you posted an answer to the MSE thread? Sounds like you know more than enough about it to make a useful, concrete proposal. The SE dev who seems to be in charge of this is clearly monitoring the answer (and showing the restraint of a particularly patient stone, my respect for this dev has gone way up since reading the comments there).

137

Q: We are switching to system fonts on May 10, 2021

Update 2 - Alright folks, got some follow-up for you. You can see I’m considering some changes over at the Stacks repo. Sidenote: did you know our front-end library is open source and y’all can see what we’re up to? macOS and iOS continue to get San Francisco Windows continues to get Segoe, but ...

Levente

With the added benefit that I wouldn't spam this chatroom with it afterwards :)
Two birds with one stone :)

Smart suggestion is smart :)

terdon

@Levente On the contrary, please do post it here too. I plan to go through your suggestions when I have time and see if I can fix my system. I just saw that the SE dev is monitoring the post and is very open to suggestions, so thought it would be great of you could give one, so maybe they'll fix it and I don't have to.

Levente

Look at this earlier message from here, especially its context:

yesterday, by BeastOfCaerbannog

@Levente I agree. But first we must identify the issues.

I have the impression that I shouldn't just barge in there and deliver my personal suggestion according to my personal taste.
--> Supposedly we should arrive to some common ground here first.
--> @Zanna for one, seems to welcome the change.

All I suggest is that as soon as we have some idea, they could possibly carry it out with relative ease...

Levente

On an unrelated note, I have peeked over to /dev/chat
What a difference in what's going on in there, so uplifting; hedgehogs, squirrells and woodpeckers — like a walk in a quiet meadow...

terdon

4:47 PM

@Levente Oh no, no, you should absolutely deliver your personal suggestion according to your personal taste. That's the whole point of meta. If it turns out that nobody agrees with you, you'll be downvoted. But if your personal preference matches with others' then you'll be upvoted.

That's how we get to the common ground.

lol, /dev/chat is sometimes a very strange place. Other times it is a very quiet, deserted one :)

Zanna

@nan that won't affect the font it's displayed in to others :) All the discussion about fonts is because Stack Exchange have just updated their CSS to use different fonts

@Levente as I mentioned earlier, Aaron did express willingness to add fonts for other Linuxes (or in general) to the stack, but I didn't see anyone taking up that offer with specific suggestions (Liberation Sans was in the old stack, though, so maybe they don't want to use that)

oops sorry

terdon already mentioned that

@terdon oh it looks like Linux is going back to Liberation Sans

terdon

5:04 PM

That would be great!

Levente

@terdon Agreed!

terdon

I tried to edit a post today. I couldn't face what I was faced with:

Heh, actually looks clearer in the screenshot because it's larger.

Zanna

that seems to be Cascadia (which I like!)

however, the formatting in that post is probably unsalvageable

if people have quote formatted text from a terminal, I am very tempted to ask them to start over

terdon

@Zanna it's tiny on my screen which makes it very hard to read.

@Zanna Nah, the poor OP actually really tried! They've added <br> line breaks and use quote formatting instead of code, but it's clearly out of ignorance not lack of effort.

Zanna

5:28 PM

@terdon yeah, the effort is very impressive but only makes fixing it harder :..(

jokerdino

Use 'copy as markdown' firefox addon :P

Levente

@Zanna could be done with relative ease with text editors capable of "selecting columns"

Zanna

@jokerdino wazat?

Levente

Here's a gif in the article: cathrinewilhelmsen.net/notepad-column-editing

Or, one can even use search and replace: search for `> ` and replace it with `` (a nothing, an empty string),
same with `<br>` and replace it with ``.

jokerdino

@Zanna Copy as markdown addon

Zanna

5:35 PM

@Levente yeah I do that... the problem is that quote formatting usually obliterates the original line breaks entirely

Levente

oh...

terdon

@Levente You mean a terminal?

Nice to see the GUI finally catching up... :P

Levente

well I meant `ctrl+V` in vim, but your trick is cool too.
It's actually possibly cooler, even...

terdon

It's a terminator thing: ctrl+click lets you select blocks.

It really is a great terminal.

Levente

how do you do that? right, my gnome terminal does not select columns?

terdon

5:42 PM

@Levente you need terminator.

I strongly recommend it, that column trick is the least of its features. It also has native pane splitting capabilities and various other neat tricks.

41

A: How to open terminal, split to 9 terminals and switch between them using one script?

To plagiarize myself, you can set up a profile with your desired settings (instructions adapted from here): Run terminator, and set up the layout you want. You can use Ctrl+Shift+E to split windows vertically and Ctrl+Shift+O (that's O as in oodles, not zero) to split horizontally. For this exa...

Levente

thank you, I will see when I have a free moment for system enhancements :)
--> In the meanwhile, bookmarked! :)

Levente

6:39 PM

@terdon sorry for disturbing but: vanilla gnome-terminal can select columns with ctrl+shift+mousedrag!

\o/

BeastOfCaerbannog

7:17 PM

@Zanna I usually remove unwanted text (e.g "> ", "<br>", newlines) in such cases using vim or vscode

@terdon I use kitty, because I often use ranger and kitty supports image previewing with ranger out of the box. It also has the block-selecting feature using Ctrl+Alt+click.

@jokerdino Cool extension!

@Levente Good to know it also works with gnome-terminal!

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