Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On 11-04-2014 04:35, Steven Walling wrote: How are these specific, replicable bugs? DJ is saying things the current solution is not working and we cannot do better but there is no evidence about why this is the case for such a large number of users that it requires a revert back to plain sans-serif. People are talking in generalities and about problems related to areas like non-Latin script support, but not referring to bugs filed and which would be fixed by the suggested patch. Brian's recent comment here is an example of what we are asking to hear, though I don't think that requires a full revert. [1] shows half the world complaining about the typography refresh. I'm sorry, but this is beginning to be like VE all over again; all I see now coming out of the foundation is a big, unpenetrable progaganda machine with a broken record: There is no problem! This is a good change! There are no bugs! Steven, it has been sufficiently demonstrated that the single, global font stack is technically flawed and must be reverted. With all due respect to the design team, they are *not* engineers and may not be aware of the problems as they have emerged. I will explain one more time: free/non-free fonts are not the issue, MediaWiki is now forcing a Latin font stack that does not work in non-Latin installations. This does not only affect current Mediawiki wikis but will also affect new non-Latin MW 1.23 installations; they all had/have to fix this one way or another, usually by resetting the font stack. We must focus on a system that delivers a font stack on a per-language basis. But that cannot happen as long as the global font stack is in place. Unless you can raise issues that cause actual functional problems that outweigh the benefits of the new body font stack, I don't think merging that patch is required to improve things and is worth the churn in user experience for millions of readers. *ANY* functional problem outweighs the purported benefits. That is because actual functional problems should never be weighed; they should be fixed on sight. Please Steven, and the foundation in general, PLEASE step of the propaganda wagon and do the responsible thing; remove the font stacks so that we can focus on a *real* solution that actually *does* benefit the entire world. I am really, really affraid that refusing to +2 this patch is going to affect future attempts to fix this on a per-language basis. Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
I keep hearing about ALLL THE BUGS but I've not seen anything on Bugzilla. This leads me to believe I've not been cc'ed on them or they haven't been raised (which would be bad). Please can someone raise these on Bugzilla - if these are being raised on wikis they are not getting in front of people. If their are still bugs these are being lost in the noise of this discussion. Maybe if we can clearly see where the bugs are this can resolved much quicker. It's hard to argue about the font stack if there are 20 bugs showing * a screenshot of poor rendering * the language * the operating system * the browser being used. * plus points if we can identify via inspector the font family being used Please feel free to raise these and cc me on them. I've been working on this in my spare time, and I'm hoping to get some spare time sometime next week to clean this up. Regardless of the outcome, it would be extremely useful to document these issues for The Web. On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Erwin Dokter er...@darcoury.nl wrote: On 11-04-2014 04:35, Steven Walling wrote: How are these specific, replicable bugs? DJ is saying things the current solution is not working and we cannot do better but there is no evidence about why this is the case for such a large number of users that it requires a revert back to plain sans-serif. People are talking in generalities and about problems related to areas like non-Latin script support, but not referring to bugs filed and which would be fixed by the suggested patch. Brian's recent comment here is an example of what we are asking to hear, though I don't think that requires a full revert. [1] shows half the world complaining about the typography refresh. I'm sorry, but this is beginning to be like VE all over again; all I see now coming out of the foundation is a big, unpenetrable progaganda machine with a broken record: There is no problem! This is a good change! There are no bugs! Steven, it has been sufficiently demonstrated that the single, global font stack is technically flawed and must be reverted. With all due respect to the design team, they are *not* engineers and may not be aware of the problems as they have emerged. I will explain one more time: free/non-free fonts are not the issue, MediaWiki is now forcing a Latin font stack that does not work in non-Latin installations. This does not only affect current Mediawiki wikis but will also affect new non-Latin MW 1.23 installations; they all had/have to fix this one way or another, usually by resetting the font stack. We must focus on a system that delivers a font stack on a per-language basis. But that cannot happen as long as the global font stack is in place. Unless you can raise issues that cause actual functional problems that outweigh the benefits of the new body font stack, I don't think merging that patch is required to improve things and is worth the churn in user experience for millions of readers. *ANY* functional problem outweighs the purported benefits. That is because actual functional problems should never be weighed; they should be fixed on sight. Please Steven, and the foundation in general, PLEASE step of the propaganda wagon and do the responsible thing; remove the font stacks so that we can focus on a *real* solution that actually *does* benefit the entire world. I am really, really affraid that refusing to +2 this patch is going to affect future attempts to fix this on a per-language basis. Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On 11-04-2014 13:11, Erwin Dokter wrote: [1] shows half the world complaining about the typography refresh. I forgot to include the URL: [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_refresh#Languages_problems Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On 11-04-2014 18:42, Jon Robson wrote: I keep hearing about ALLL THE BUGS but I've not seen anything on Bugzilla. That's because you don't *want* to see... Most of the reports on [1] are from readers who don't know anything about Bugzilla. That doesn't make that anything less valid. Since that page was linked as the primary feedback page when the refresh was announced, it should be the first place to check for error reports. Claiming non-existence of Bugzilla reports is just plain selective ignorance. There is also a tracking bug [2] with plenty bugs attached, among the [3], [4] and [5]; *all* language related. Buth the bug reports and Typography talk page have plenty of screenshots. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_refresh#Languages_problems [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63549 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63720 [4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63718 [5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63817 Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Erwin Dokter er...@darcoury.nl wrote: I forgot to include the URL: [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_refresh# Languages_problems Out of all of these, the most clear is that serifs are not great for the headings in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. This seems to be true even of default 'serif', per https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63817 In the interim, I'm going to help the wikis with these languages if they want to set a local override. Starting next week, I think Jon and I would like to explore how to extend our Less variables to set a better default for headings in CJK languages. (I will file a bug today). This is a pretty important enhancement for the long run I think. There are wikis like Farsi and Japanse Wikipedia that have needed to override the default settings basically forever, to get good basic readability. If we can use Less to set language-specific fonts then we can start upstreaming some of the settings that have lingered in Vector and Common CSS for a long time. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Erwin Dokter er...@darcoury.nl wrote: There is also a tracking bug [2] with plenty bugs attached, among the [3], [4] and [5]; *all* language related. Buth the bug reports and Typography talk page have plenty of screenshots. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_refresh# Languages_problems [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63549 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63720 [4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63718 [5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63817 3 is not language-related, it's about how some users have bad (basically knockoff) versions of Helvetica installed by HP printers or the user, which render poorly on older Windows systems. We're trying to figure out whether this is a real problem at scale, or whether the best thing to recommend is to simply turn off those fonts, since they won't render well on any site. 4 is a bug that needs to be dealt with in ULS, per Santhosh's comment at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63718#c5 5 will be fixed per what I said in the email just before. The one thing on the mediawiki.org Talk page we haven't fully investigated is the potential issue with inconsistent x-height in Cyrillic. We still need to figure out whether that's font specific, browser specific or what. There are no details present about what OS/font is used in that report, so we need to investigate how widely applicable the report actually is. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
Since that page was linked as the primary feedback page when the refresh was announced, it should be the first place to check for error reports. Claiming non-existence of Bugzilla reports is just plain selective ignorance. I disagree. Bugzilla is where we report bugs. If no one raises bugs as they will go lost. Perhaps all the user reported bugs should be added to Bugzilla for tracking purposes. But it's not reasonable to expect the average user to report them there. Brian/NF ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Brian Cox nativeforeignerw...@gmail.comwrote: Perhaps all the user reported bugs should be added to Bugzilla for tracking purposes. But it's not reasonable to expect the average user to report them there. Brian/NF Yes I think we definitely need to track things in Bugzilla, but you're right Brian. The average reader especially is not going to be able to figure out bug filing. Nemo, Jared, and others have been trying to migrate bugs there or ask people to do so where they can. Nemo in particular deserves thanks for trying to spend some time helping us wrangle Bugzilla for typography refresh. :) Once things are tracked there and we can replicate them, we'll do our best to fix issues that are widely applicable. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On Fri, 2014-04-11 at 09:42 -0700, Jon Robson wrote: I keep hearing about ALLL THE BUGS but I've not seen anything on Bugzilla. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63549 dependency list plus likely stuff on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_refresh that I'd expect the developers to read and convert into bug reports, when necessary. andre -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
On 11-04-2014 20:00, Jon Robson wrote: Please don't accuse me of things that are not true. I do want to see these things, but I have to manage 1) mailing lists 2) bugzilla 3) wiki pages (which i have to know exist). I am only human. Thanks for the links to bugs I've cc'ed myself on all of these. That was not my intention, I'm sorry. But I am getting so frustrated because the foundation keeps giving the impression that it does not even acknowledge that there is a problem, or at least refuses to remedy it by clinging on the currently broken implementaion. Since that page was linked as the primary feedback page when the refresh was announced, it should be the first place to check for error reports. Claiming non-existence of Bugzilla reports is just plain selective ignorance. I disagree. Bugzilla is where we report bugs. If no one raises bugs as they will go lost. Then that should have been in the FAQ. The announcement only sends the readers to the talk page to give feedback. Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Free fonts and Windows users; final plea!
It looks like Nemo has been doing this (thanks a bunch Nemo) but I wasn't cc'ed on any of these reports so I was getting just as frustrated as you thinking we were inside a black hole :) I don't expect the average user to raise bugs. This would be a great thing to discuss in the retrospective - as soon as a beta feature stops being a beta feature, we should have flushed the contents of the typography talk page and asked that people raise bugs or at least we/i should have been more attentive and raised bugs on behalf of those users to ensure that common problems could be collated and addressed. On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Erwin Dokter er...@darcoury.nl wrote: On 11-04-2014 20:00, Jon Robson wrote: Please don't accuse me of things that are not true. I do want to see these things, but I have to manage 1) mailing lists 2) bugzilla 3) wiki pages (which i have to know exist). I am only human. Thanks for the links to bugs I've cc'ed myself on all of these. That was not my intention, I'm sorry. But I am getting so frustrated because the foundation keeps giving the impression that it does not even acknowledge that there is a problem, or at least refuses to remedy it by clinging on the currently broken implementaion. Since that page was linked as the primary feedback page when the refresh was announced, it should be the first place to check for error reports. Claiming non-existence of Bugzilla reports is just plain selective ignorance. I disagree. Bugzilla is where we report bugs. If no one raises bugs as they will go lost. Then that should have been in the FAQ. The announcement only sends the readers to the talk page to give feedback. Regards, -- Erwin Dokter ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Jon Robson * http://jonrobson.me.uk * https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson * @rakugojon ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
