Font setup on OSMF mediawiki instance

Foundation
1

Is there anything special with the way fonts are set up on the OSMF website?

Every time I visit the site I am affected by something which looks like font aliasing artefacts.

I have never such issues on other websites and I actually do visit many. Happens on a Windows 10 machine, on both Firefox and Chrome browsers.

See a screenshot to explain it, especially visible on the letters: C, D, S, e, o

image

I see that font size is specified in em, which resulted for me in a font size of 18.88px. Setting it manually to 18px results in a clear font, 19px do render broken like in the shown screenshot.

Using other fonts like Arial or Vardana render fine.

Could it be an issue with the specific font used? fontdrop.info identified the font as “Palanquin”.
Using other font, like noto-sans does also have no aliasing problems on different font sizes.

Is there any specific requirement for using such an unusual webfont? Why not simply using noto? That might bring the benefit of 30% improved readability as well. See https://readabilitylab.xyz/

1 Like
2

The font is called osmftext. I don’t know if they have really designed it themselves. But yes, it surely has some scaling issues.

3

There’s an open Github issue out there: Bold variant of the font seems weird/broken · Issue #6 · osmfoundation/osmf-mediawiki-skin · GitHub

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4

4.5 years to fix a font. And still counting.

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It appears that noone, including you, cared enough to fix it or arrange someone to fix it.

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As mentioned, the font is “Palanquin”. The osmftext is the alias used for the local copy of the webfont. Open the woff in some font explorer, for example the online one I linked, allows you to get additional details.

I do not know enough about fonts to explain why it seems to have such weird aliasing effects on certain font sizes. Other fonts do not have this problem, so I attribute this problem to the font.

Seems to be in line with the problems reported before. Thanks to mmd for linking to the relevant bug entry.

While readability is at least for me significantly affected, I do not read this OSMF wiki frequently enough to feel it worth fighting for a small change like swapping out a font file for another for endless amount of time.

The version used at OSMF is relatively old. getting a more recent copy with a modification date 3 years more recent does not have this problem, which I was able to reproduce on the fontdrop site.

I will suggest an update on the github page in the hope the someone with commit power will do take action.

4 Likes
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Could people retest? I have just swapped out the font.

1 Like
8

Looks good, no artefacts that I could notice. Thanks @stephankn and @Firefishy for fixing this 5 year old issue.

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I don’t have full visibility of all things OSM, if there is anything like this in the future it is best to add it to the Ops issue tracker.

10

Probably a hinting problem.