Anyone else notice the new font ?

I haven't actually noticed anything, as I use Ubuntu and Android to use the site, so nothing's really changed.

heh I'm on Devuan and its a clear change

From memory, SE screwed around with fonts a couple years ago, and it was reverted at the time

Yay, the luddites on win are going stark raving mad about this.

Naturally on a site full of coders,.... stackapps.com/questions/8932/…

and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364279/…

Good night

Simple fix: get a Mac or non-Ubuntu Linux. :-P

The bigger underlying problem is that designers always wanted full control over gute things looked. Rather than what things mean. Letting the browser decide the layout (as in plain HTML)

I'm on Mac and only notice a difference in the font when writing a new answer

I did notice when they changed the (line) spacing (to 1.6??) last year and it was too much for me to read well before they settled on a middle ground. The font either hasn't changed for me, or has no difference in readability and I don't notice

phew

@gschenk I bridle slightly at the "Luddite" bit; my computer is Gentoo, but work is on Windows so I'm stuck with it more than 2/3 of the time.

And despite many (many) hours of trying we've been unable to get all required programs (from the company and the major clients) working on Linux.

@DavidW the subset of luddites on Windows. Not that everyone who uses win is a luddite. But the cry was "Why not use Arial. Arial web font is free to use and unchanged since '95."

I dunno about Arial, I never really paid attention to the font before. But what was switched to is quite a bit worse, at least for usability on Win 10. It's fainter and washed out, definitely harder to read. It's not as bad rendered in black, which brings it back to about the readability of the previous font.

But the current text colour is only about 85% black.

If it's washed out that might be a different issues.

So I'm going to have to override either the font selection or the text colour.

@gschenk Comparing before and after, the only difference is the font.

People reported that Firefox doesn't render anti aliasing properly.

Work machine is Chrome, so it's not that.

It seems that there are just bugs in Windows or browsers that break it.

Given the mess of cut-off descenders and generally bad line layout, I'm inclined to just override the font.

But the rest to go is not to work around upstream bugs with bodges. Just make them visible and her them fixed upstream.

It may not be Windows per se, it could be that they've picked an idiosyncratic font, or one that doesn't have good hinting.

@gschenk Well, that's ideal, certainly. No argument. But I have no evidence that it's worth waiting for SE to (fail to) fix things.

And I mean it's Windows. If you'd make its UX not suck it would lose its look and feel :-p

It's Windows system font. How can that not work perfectly?

That's what widows Devs must have expected as default for everything?!

Normally I don't notice Windows very much. I spend my time in the IDE, the browser, and shell windows. (Well, and Teams and Zoom and Slack and, sadly, Outlook.)

I don't even interact with the start menu on 90% of days.

Or whatever you/they call the grotesquerie that erupts when you accidentally click left of the leftmost application icon.

(outlook is pretty ok now. It was a complete nightmare but that seems only the non 365 webpage)

@DavidW at my last job I usually did hit the widows key and typed the name of the app I needed. On most days that was Chromium, RDP, and VirtualBox only.

I just lock the screen at night, and leave everything running. (Saves time restarting VMs, redeploying the appserver and apps, etc.) So when I log on in the morning everything is there. I maybe hit the Windows key when I want to run Gimp or get to the control panel.

And never ever mistakenly open the standalone office apps. They load for ages and slow everything down to a crawl. I accidentally opened files with local Excel from time to time.

I think we only have the standalone apps. Certainly the clients would freak out if they found out we were loading their spreadsheets into a cloud app that might mirror their data into the cloud.

Something on the corporate notebook prevented it getting to deeper sleep states. It burned something like 10W the whole night. So I always shut it down.

But we have decent-powered desktops with reasonable amounts of memory. (6th or 7th generation i7s with 32GB of memory.)

We're not supposed to power the machines off; maintenance and patching and stuff are scheduled for overnight.

I don't think it's a problem in Europe. MS has GDPR compliant services. The legal advisors also audited and ruled that the exact technical implementation is of no concern to clients as long as it is compliant with finance regulation, GDPR, and those other audit rules.

And if you miss that your computer will insist on updating when you bring it up, which can cost you half an hour or more if the update is slow.

I couldn't understand hat it was hiding the updates. They have away a chance to make users happy for getting new patches.

I don't know the exact rules, but I know a couple of our clients (including the one I'm working on) have numerous banks (37 in this case I think) as their clients. So they're bound by all kinds of requirements from all over the world. I think they're just defensively paranoid; we're not even allowed access to a lot of information, and there's heavy auditing on what we can access.

That old thinking was also in my old company. Can you imagine they were mailing xls files back and forth renaming them at every iteration when they wanted to collaborate!

Right now there isn't even anyone on my team permitted to view the production logs. (Despite the fact we've had a couple of audits to make sure no passwords, client account names, account numbers, etc. are written to them.)

Oh no, no e-mail! You don't e-mail confidential information!

You RDP into a secure server to view it.

It's like working in heavy mitts sometimes, but it's genuinely secure.

Well it was internal mail on exchange server.

@BicyclesMeta Maybe instead of demanding that the site conform to your belief of how it should work, you should relax, and just accept that sometimes different people do things different ways? I bet you're a joy to work with too.

Oh and @Criggie that comment thread looks really strange with a bunch of replies from you to comments that don't exist anymore. Which is one reason that premature clean-up is annoying.

@DavidW Yeah - each one is less of a reply and more of a "why your comment was deleted" along with "what you should have done with it"

out of context its a mess, but each poster can still see their own comment, to copy the text into an answer for example

If I use mod powers to send each user a direct message, that gets noted and I'd rather not use the facility.

@DavidW BicyclesMeta is a bot that posts things from Meta. Its not OP in that case.

I know that.

Meta is so low-volume that I never check it.

I wasn't quite annoyed enough to actually reply to OP with it, or at least I didn't feel like arguing about it.

-grin- OP did raise a good point and at the same time that was an extreme example of not-comments.

OP was also right - we're a lot more casual and take things like that on a case-by-case basis

The other site I'm active on, Science Fiction & Fantasy, practically has a tradition of humorous comments (on the right questions).

I'd leave a single funny comment alone, for example. Whereas other SE sites have a strict "no humour" policy. Others even have a dedicated day/period for less-seriousness, like our [april-fool] tag.

yeah - and Bicycles.SE isn't a big site, so every user lost is gone. Sites like SO have millions of users. We have to literally "be nice" to all new users where reasonable.

hehehe

you know those comment flags mean nothing, right ? They don't give rep.

The only good a comment upvote does is if the section gets collapsed, then the higher rated comments are left exposed and lower-rated comments are hidden.

I know that. That's why it's galling that my 10-second bit of drollery has 50 more upvotes than my best answer.

(not comment flags, comment votes)

-grin- Must have been on-point :)

It was, I guess. It was a silly Star Wars question, something like "why did star wars take place 'long, long ago'?"

And I had this momentary "wat" reaction and just blatted out "If it took place in the future we wouldn't have heard about it yet."

Apparently, over 160 people thought that was a useful response.

heheh definitely a good comeback.

It's the quintessence of what a comment is not for, however, it's half an answer and half a joke. But it was kept around anyway.

And its accurate, true,correct, funny, and brief.

Because SF is more relaxed about things like that.

TBH that could be an answer all by itself right there. It has all the facts needed, there is nothing to expand on.

Someitmes a one-line answer is exactly all you need.

I didn't think of that. It seemed too easy.

Sorry, gotta go; dog needs a walk!

heh take mine too - its persisting with rain here.

:) Dry right now here.