Larger, different font

[brownsarahm]

Is the font in the remote theme supposed to be different than the font in styles? It renders as larger, bolder, and I find it to be less readable.

[tkphd]

I have to agree, I find the Ubuntu font distracting. The sharp angles make me notice the characters, rather than easily reading the words, which is poor type design. @fmichonneau, can we choose a better one?

[fmichonneau]

Thanks for the feedback. Using the Ubuntu font is a test for carpentries/styles#324 and the original issue carpentries/styles#168.

The Ubuntu font provides a good differentiation of characters that look similar in other fonts (0O1Il) including the one we currently use in the styles repo. This change is intended to improve accessibility.

Compared to other fonts, it has gone through a very thorough design process to enhance legibility and has support for glyphs for around 200 languages (see details).

We are open to other suggestions if you know of a font that provides good character distinctiveness though!

[tkphd]

OK, I did a quick survey of fonts on my system, with language support notes through Font Squirrel (non-authoritative, but consistent), and using a common pangram and the string from Oh, oh, zero! to compare distinctiveness.

The two that make my eyes bleed least are Linux Biolinum and Google Noto Sans; they support 166 and 170 languages, respectively, compared to Ubuntu's 160 (based solely on deduplicating the lists on the FontSquirrel pages). Where Ubuntu favors circles and a futuristic aesthetic, the other two keep it more traditional, but add flair where necessary for distinction. Biolinum's flair is a bit more subtle -- compare the capital i glyphs -- while Noto Sans tends to stretch that "sans" assertion to its limits, in favor of distinction.

Anything catch your eye as a suitable option?

[unode]

Hi everyone,

Possibly related, while working on carpentries-incubator jekyll lesson we experienced some issues with distinguishing bold from normal text at different zoom levels (see carpentries-incubator/jekyll-pages-novice#142).

While picking from the above suggestions, could you also consider readability and contrast of italicized and bold styles?

Alternatively, could we perhaps consider the same fonts used by GitHub? The main advantage being that they have been battle tested by a few million users. I'm not sure how system dependent this is but here GitHub renders with TeX Gyre Heros which seems to have a compatible license (LaTeX public license)

I find the bold contrast and readability rather comfortable: