The change to the Oswald font causes issues and is generally irritatingFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

Hi,

The site semi-recently started using the Oswald font (or it was always there and just suddenly started 'working' on my machine). I am finding this deeply frustrating.

Firstly, the size is different to the old sans-serif font and as such has screwed up some UI elements. Of particular note are the buttons for Auto Plot when editing a route. These now read "Off", "By", "On", "By" as the actually important word is cut off.

The ETA and Km columns in the directions list now overflows into their respective adjacent column.

Secondly, I find it much harder to read than sans-serif. I'm not sure how to quantify this but it is extremely frustrating and goes beyond just disliking the aesthetic. I think the easiest way to explain it is that everything used to be readable at a glance but now I am finding I have to concentrate to figure out what they say.

Please change the font back.

Thanks.

Hi Tom - we haven't made any changes to our fonts, we're using the same fonts we launched the site with in 2014. I'm wondering if it's something to do with the ease of access display settings on your computer - have a look at the Ease of Access section under your Windows settings for anything that might increase the size of text.

John

Hi John,

I use Chrome on Linux. Up until recently the font used was always sans-serif then it suddenly changed. It's not a font size change, the whole font changed as well as size. That's why I thought it was the site. I just tried Chrome on Windows and it looks normal there. I'm not sure what happened, but it does look like a local issue. 

I have to go out now but will look at it properly when I get back and post a screenshot.

Thanks,

Tom.

Hi John,

Sorry for the delay. Attached is a screenshot comparing how this looks on Firefox and Chrome. It looks like I was wrong about the font and size being different, it's just the spacing that's screwed up and it only seems to be doing it on Chrome. The route planner is not the only place that it is screwed, but it is the most problematic. If hotlinking the screenshot doesn't work then https://photos.app.goo.gl/8rcFUAePPTXcm2b36 should do.

I've tried clearing caches and two different computers and it's doing the same thing on both. This makes me think that it's not just my system but something odd is going on with the site on Chrome on Linux. For what it's worth, this is Chrome version 75.0.3770.90 and Firefox version 60.7.0esr.

Cheers,

Tom.

Thanks for these screenshots Tom. Yes, it does appear that the letter spacing is messed up. From what I can see it only seems to be affecting elements on the map. We don't have a Linux machine here that we can test this out on, so it's hard to know for definite what's causing that, but we've added an explicit letter spacing style to the map overlays to see if this helps. Let me know if that's resolved it.

John

Hi John,

That doesn't seem to have made any difference. I just checked the exact same version of Chrome on Windows and MacOS to be sure and it's working normally on both. I've tried Chrome on other Linux machines, including test VMs that have never been anywhere near the site, and they all screw up without fail so it's not isolated to one machine. It did used to work fine but unfortunately I don't remember what version of Chrome it last worked on.

So I don't know. I think it will probably have to be chalked up to an obscure Chrome bug and I'll just use Firefox instead.

Thanks for trying to fix it.

Tom.

That's a shame.  These days there are very few differences in the way different browsers behave but there can still be occasional bugs.

John