Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Questions and discussion about B-Greek policies or the B-Greek forum.

Can you see the text correctly?

Yes
24
96%
No
1
4%
 
Total votes: 25

Jonathan Robie
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Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
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Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

For now, I've simply set the board to use sans-serif fonts that should be widely supported.

Is anyone still getting characters in different sizes, or missing characters? If so, on what browser and operating system?

Here's my current thinking: it looked a lot better before I started messing with fonts. I need to figure out which CSS selectors are used for the post titles and post content, and set just those. I'm inclined to use a sans-serif font for post titles, if I can find a serif font for post content that most people can use without installing anything, I'll use it.

In other words, let's not disrupt fonts in those places where Greek doesn't occur, and make sure we support it where it does.

Make sense?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
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Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
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Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Stephen Carlson »

OK, for the most part, I'm getting sans serif, but I'm still seeing Gentium in post titles and input text boxes.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4235
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I have now set it up so that:

1. Everything except for posts uses the default fonts.
2. Posts use the following fonts:

Code: Select all

font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS", "Liberation Sans", Tahoma, sans-serif;
In theory, I think this should make people happy. I'm not terribly experienced at cross-browser font issues, so it may well not work on some platforms - please tell me how this works for yours.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3355
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Stephen Carlson »

OK, things seem more consistent now.

Stephen
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4235
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

For the benefit of anyone administering this forum in the future, what I'm using now differs from the default prosilver theme by only two lines.

Here's the git diff output:

Code: Select all

diff --git a/content.css b/content.css
index 64beb97..fe1a295 100644
--- a/content.css
+++ b/content.css
@@ -226,6 +226,7 @@ div[class].topic-actions {
 /* Post body styles
 ----------------------------------------*/
 .postbody {
+       font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS", "Liberation Sans", Tahoma, sans-serif;
        padding: 0;
        line-height: 1.48em;
        color: #333333;
@@ -250,7 +251,7 @@ div[class].topic-actions {
        margin: 0 0 0.3em 0 !important;
        text-transform: none;
        border: none;
-       font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
+       /* font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; */
        line-height: 125%;
 }
If you don't need to administer this site, don't worry about it ;->

But someone else setting up some similar system may discover this and save some time.

Nigel: the cross browser test sites you mentioned were very helpful. The free version was so slow that it was hard to use, so I signed up for a 7 day free trial (which I'll cancel since I don't do much of this kind of development).

I should have realized my wife would know how to test this kind of thing. When I told her about Nigel's tools, she said:
I use this:

https://browserlab.adobe.com/

You have to create an account with Adobe and it doesn't have as many combinations available, but it's free.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4235
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

People using Internet Explorer 6 may still have some problems, but they are two versions behind and we can simply tell them to upgrade their browser (for free). And not many people are still using Internet Explorer 6 (only 2.4% of total users).

Incidentally, Firefox is now on top, and Chrome is slightly ahead of Internet Explorer:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Other than that, I think most browsers on most operating systems should be OK now.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Nigel Chapman
Posts: 74
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 4:55 pm
Location: Sydney Australia
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Nigel Chapman »

I think this approach might work:

We can embed GFS Didot using the Google font directory; it's some extra bandwidth when it downloads; but if users install the face, that won't occur. Probably. Also, the face is pretty much vanilla; it's very much like one of my Nestle-Alands, and may prove unobjectionable. We should still overload the CSS to accept preferred fonts when they are present.

Making the Greek words slightly larger than the surrounding English does wonders for the readability of the accents, particularly if the line-spacing is extended with it. Here's what this looks like on Firefox (applied to Dr Conrad's post earlier today).

Image

I need to tweak the JS a bit more, since it has to be limited to just user-entered content, not the whole content of the page (which would include text in text-areas making previewing impossible). The CSS in this example is, effectively:

Code: Select all

.greek { 
    font-family:  /* Suggest a longer list here, to cover user preferences */ GFS Didot, /* embedded using Google */ serif;  
    font-size: large; 
    line-height: 125%; 
}
The screenshot was created with GFS Didot installed locally, and the regex setup to also grab spaces between Greek words. It makes the JS kind of scary, but improves the visual word-spacing.

Code: Select all

document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/([\u0370-\u037D\u0386-\u0386\u0388-\u03FF\u1F00-\u1FFF][\u0370-\u037D\u0386-\u0386\u0388-\u03FF\u1F00-\u1FFF\s]*[\u0370-\u037D\u0386-\u0386\u0388-\u03FF\u1F00-\u1FFF]?)/g, '<span style="font-family: GFS Didot, serif; font-size: large; line-height: 125%;">$1</span>');
I'm curious how readers with very high Greek fluency respond to this slightly-enlarged Greek text style ... Comments?
"When eras die their legacies are left to strange police." -- Clarence Day
Nigel Chapman | http://chapman.id.au
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4235
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Where would that JavaScript reside? Not in the final page, that's clear, I'm wondering if you know what needs to be modified in the phpBB style to make this work?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Nigel Chapman
Posts: 74
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 4:55 pm
Location: Sydney Australia
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Nigel Chapman »

Hi Jonathan -- The JS will be a few more lines than you see there; it has to apply to only the div.postbody objects. Easy in jQuery, which I usually use, but there's more to do in bare JS. Also, Greek unicode could legitimately appear as part of URLS, and they mustn't be marked up. So the regex will need word-boundary checking.

I'm not sure where the right place for the JS would be; I'll try and find some info on phpBB customization best-practice in the next day or so. We should add a '.greek' class to the CSS; I favour splitting off our own style if the styles include javascript files (which I think they must since they'll have to support different navigation menus in different layouts). It would be ideal to have no mods to the phpBB code itself.
"When eras die their legacies are left to strange police." -- Clarence Day
Nigel Chapman | http://chapman.id.au
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4235
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

A phpBB theme can inherit another, so that makes it easier to design modified themes in a maintainable way. I haven't done this, but I've read that this is possible.

Also: Does Didot do English text well? If there's an easy way to support Google Web Fonts in phpBB using the Prosilver theme, and Didot works for both English and Greek, we may not need to find hooks for the JavaScript.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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