I don't like the new font on the website

LennardF1989

Since a few days, Saturday I believe, the site is featuring a new font.

I'm not really a fan of it. It looks like the characters are slightly squeezed together and give a somewhat vague/out of focus look. Could you please consider a different font, or make an option to revert to the old one.

I could also live with having the name of the original webfont so I can use a CSS injector to "fix" it myself.

Otherwise, great site! Thanks!

rob006

We haven't changed the used font since GG.deals release. We're using Lato Font.

Make sure that you don't have such font installed locally in your OS - your browser should prefer local font if available, so crappy font using "Lato" name installed on your computer may affect how GG.deals website looks like.

LennardF1989

Hmm, that's odd. It started looking like this since Saturday or so.

Notice how most of the capitals have a thicker outline and how narrow spaced they are. I haven't changed a thing font-wise on my system, I just checked the dates of these files too.

What's weird is that the headers also use the same font, but don't look like that.

Notice the difference between this "C" and the one from "Nioh: Complete Edition" above.

So I started playing around with the font-size, and it seems there is a sweet-spot where this particular font goes from clear to smudgy, back to clear. font-size: 13px appears how it used to be, 14-16px then starts to look weird, and starting from 17px it looks fine again (the sweet-spot is slightly different for non-bold).

Is there any chance you guys played with a minuscule font-size change in a recent update?

Or maybe, just maybe, my mind just decided this font looks weird at this size. Looking back into the internet archive (eg. https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111215/https://gg.deals/), I'm seeing the same thing...

LennardF1989

Ok, apparantly it's not me. The screenshots in the first post is EXACTLY my situation. https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/644

From the post I understand it has to do with an update to the font-files. Did you guys happen to have updated these fairly recently (eg. fonts/lato-v11-latin_latin-ext-regular.ttf), or something related to it?

Maybe a long shot, but were the fonts updated to support more foreign characters, eg. Chinese?

EDIT: The ones featured on http://www.latofonts.com/ look exactly how gg.deals used to look for me when I set them to 14px.

LennardF1989

Alright, played a little more. Decided to remove the Lato fonts locally even though they hadn't changed in over a year.

The browser still showed the "bad version", so I played with the CSS again. Apparently, the version of the font in my earlier screenshot is Lato2, whereas Lato is usually the leading font. I can now directly reproduce the difference by setting font-family to Lato2, and fix the "issue" by setting it back to Lato.

The website looks normal again now, so apparently it decided to pick Lato over Lato2 again. However, I have no idea why Chrome had decided to render the website using Lato2 in the first place, all of a sudden at that...

One thing is for sure, Lato2 is an awful looking version of Lato and I would recommend ditching it 😛 Even the fallback sans-serif is better on the eyes.

rob006

LennardF1989 Lato2 is used as a fallback for glyphs not available in basic Lato (mostly cyrillic). So far it worked fine - Lato font was used for latin and latin-ext, and Lato2 was used only for some rare cases (like "руб." currency or cyrillic letters in game name).

We haven't changed anything in fonts recently, so it may be some change in Chrome. Does it look the same on Firefox? Can you share more details about your system and browser version?

LennardF1989

Sure, currently using Chrome 77.0.3865.90, on Windows 10 Pro Build 14393 (It's old, I know, I have my reasons 😛).

I just tried Mozilla 69.0.1, and can confirm it loads Lato fine. When I force the use of Lato2, it looks equally awful as was the case in Chrome, so it's not a browser-specific issue. More so (web)font related.

I seem to be unable to reproduce why it would ever take Lato2 over Lato... You would almost think my system fonts suddenly became "corrupted". I made a backup yesterday, as soon as I restore those, the issue returns. Even in Mozilla. I could share the font files if so desired. They do not seem corrupted in any way, they just render... weirdly.

rob006

LennardF1989 When I force the use of Lato2, it looks equally awful as was the case in Chrome, so it's not a browser-specific issue.

Actually this is expected - weird rendering of Lato 2 is a known issue. We wouldn't use two fonts if Lato 2 was fine. 🙂

LennardF1989 I made a backup yesterday, as soon as I restore those, the issue returns.

Restore what? Do you have a setup where it looks fine on Chrome?

LennardF1989

Oh yes, sorry for being vague. Following your remark on system fonts, I removed all Lato related fonts from my system. And the rendering went back to how it used to be.

Weird thing is though, that the fonts I removed hadn't changed since 2018-ish, so they "suddenly" went corrupt for some reason.

rob006

LennardF1989 Oh yes, sorry for being vague. Following your remark on system fonts, I removed all Lato related fonts from my system. And the rendering went back to how it used to be.

Well, that looks like a problem with your local environment. System font will be preferred over webfont served from our server, so if removing this font from system fixes rendering on our website, something must we wrong with local font. We could try to force webfont, but this may slow down our website, so we want to avoid it (unless we get more reports like this and this will become a common problem).