Do you remember that time when EVERYTHING changed...?

Eben Sorkin, the author of Merriweather, is a total nerd when it comes to font hinting.

http://ebensorkin.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/font-hinting-mysterydiscovery/

He's gone and used loopholes in the format and tooling to give the lower-case 'g' an additional set of hints at small sizes.

This is why Merriweather was #2 on our list. Elena has better j's, and I prefer the punctuation of Elena (less jarring, the Merriweather quotes are way too long)... but I was always concerned they weren't quite as nerdy on the hinting and hadn't the number of users to really put it to the test in the real world.

Fuck me @Velocio that is a million times better on iPad 2 Safari. So readable now. Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

The only thing I don't like about Merriweather is the boring dumb-quotes I expect you could educate them as part of the markdown. I implemented something called Smartypants on the Theopen.com.
http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

“testing isn’t it?” - Yeah, smart quotes are quite nice.

Georgia I'm curious about - isn't it a system font on almost everything, so there wouldn't be a cost, or the need for a webfont.

And don't forget about sub-pixel rendering (which is what tools like Cleartype do) which adjusts the red,green and blue values individually using actual sorcery:

You could totally geek-out on this stuff: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-font-rendering/

I just don't like these 'classic style' (for want of a better term) fonts at all :( I find them fiddly to read, kind of reminds me of old websites where everything is in times new roman.

I guess this is the fashion now what with Twitter and all that, but some level of user control would be nice.

Give me arial or give me death.

Smart quotes are even worse than single apostrophe accidents.

We had it enabled in the early stage of the alpha testing, and every test site had some issues with it. Either in quoting and copying the text, or in accidentally marking things up.

Core markdown is a small set of rules that are fairly predictable, but smartypants introduces a whole load of new replacements that may or may not happen depending on the implementation. It's a full replacement for MS Word replacements, not just smart quotes, but fractions, smilies (as emoji chars), etc.

It was a nightmare, and all site admins complained about user frustrations.

Disabled by unanimous approval from site admins (as it made their users happier).

I couldn't turn it on now even if I could somehow improve when it is applied by creating a rules engine to enable/disable it.

You always should have control over a website, and you do on this one.

If your browser doesn't let you override fonts (it should) then just adblock fonts.googleapis.com and all of the custom fonts should stop working and your browser fonts will kick in.

To be fair I did implement it to sanitise content from MS Word that editors pasted into the CMS. For that it worked nicely, and is still in place all these years later. I do recall quite a bit of tuning though. I may very well have made it only fix quotes, m-dashes, apostrophes and the other MS-Word-only encodings.

You’re being disingenuous in your reply to +Jezston though. You know that a huge amount of traffic on this site is Safari on iOS - how are those users supposed to block the google font API or override the CSS?* There’s no interface for it. You know he’s asking for some kind of user-interface to customise that.

*You can, as it happens, but you have to enable debugging in settings, plug it into a Mac running Mavericks with the USB cable and start up Safari on that, then enable debug mode, choose the iPad from the menu and then use the inspector to manipulate it.

I think you answered your own question. You can do it.

Besides, #1 browser on LFGSS is Chrome at over 50%, #2 is Safari (on Mac and iOS), #3 Firefox.

The Safari + iOS combo on it's own is relatively small.

My argument for browsers that remove user control is that you should complain to the browser makers, Apple.

Can you change Facebook fonts? Twitter fonts? Only by the same method as on here, to use the user agent to assert your preferences.

If Mark Zuckerberg posted here then I'd be asking him to change all sorts of things. Has he got a bike? This could be our chance!

I wouldn't know about Twitter. It's pointless and awful.
Facebook's look and feel is well-established (and very conventional). Both those organisations respond to user feedback though.

This new LFGSS is, for most people, a few weeks old. (And yes, certain elements of it fly in the face of established usability and accessibility practice). If they have feedback on your design choices then now is the time to listen to it and take it on board. It's a new product, there are going to be things, decisions that you made, that are wrong about it. Accept that.

This needn't be an issue. You've got the perfect platform for a bit of user-customisable UI. If that's what people want, then why not empower them? That little font-resizing widget on the old forum worked well. People liked it. What's the harm in a little dropdown of three or four fonts, a text-size thing, etc?

Did you change the font-weight over the weekend? Suddenly all has gone very light. I love the font, but it loses a lot of it's charm at this weight.

I'm on the latest Safari on Mavericks, FWIW. Web inspector is saying body copy is now at 300.

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I changed it to the lighter variant yestereve. I'm not sold on it, but the 400 weight looked too heavy on some devices... and this suffers from the 300 looking too thin.

Okay...

Has there been a body font change within the last 20 mins or is it just me?

It now looks like a Georgia, but the type appears very light (in weight rather than colour). And almost as if it's aliased.

Did you read the post just prior?

#pagefail on my part.

I was attentively reading page thirtysomething for clues!

IMO it's not so good bellow 100%. Anyone using a desktop is going to scale this forum down now, so they're going to see this font slightly breaking up.

On the other hand, the letterspacing at 100% is loads better than before. The earlier version looked as if it was tracked in and too tight.

...perhaps I'll get used to huuuge type.

perhaps I'll get used to huuuge type

This is smaller than before.

Do you have a screenshot of what you are seeing?

Ideally a screenshot including this comment.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Erm, that last line was a pangram, and not an instruction.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

fnar

It does look little now.

I've just refreshed and it's now a heavier weight.

It reads well at 75% throughout, but spacing isn't as hot at 100%.

... I'll do you some grabs now. Although they wont show what I initially moaned about.

100

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90

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75

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