Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git Rev News edition 69

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 3:24 PM Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:

A nit-pick that has bothered me for years...

The font seems to be the same as git-scm.com, which is horrendous [1] in Linux. The style was clearly developed by people in the Git teaching industrial complex, who use macOS, not Linux.

The font-family list is Adelle, Georgia, Times New Roman. None of which are present in Linux systems (and the first one costs $540 USD). Then it falls back to "serif", which is already the default. So basically on Linux there is no font. It has the same font as "<p>Hello world<p>".

I was told in university that the best fonts to read on screens are sans-serif (Arial), and in paper serif (Times New Roman). Which is why the first thing I do in an HTML page is to add a style: body { font-family: sans-serif; }. But somehow nobody in this lucrative industry managed to do s/\<serif\>/sans-serif/ for Linux users.

Anyway, enough ranting.

After investigating all the different fonts specified in the list (present in macOS and Windows), I sent a fix [2] to pick similar fonts for Linux. The best one is Roboto Slab [3], which looks very similar to Adelle, and it's free. Alternatively, DejaVu Serif [4] is a good second option present in many (most?) Linux systems, plus it's how it looks on Windows with Georgia. And lastly, plain old (but not 90s old) sans-serif [5].

And now it finally looks readable to me.

Cheers.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/IGwT40T.png [2] https://github.com/git/git.github.io/pull/470 [3] https://i.imgur.com/iD4rTv8.png [4] https://i.imgur.com/hVu3VNS.png [5] https://i.imgur.com/7KXVsQa.png