Bug 298014

Summary:	Dogfood: please, change the font to Oxygen.
Product:	[Websites] www.kde.org	Reporter:	Alejandro Nova <alejandronova>
Component:	general	Assignee:	kde-www mailing-list <kde-www>
Status:	RESOLVED INTENTIONAL
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	eugene.trounev, imalchow
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Alejandro Nova 2012-04-13 05:58:20 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.8.2 Safari/534.34
Build Identifier: 

http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Oxygen

"The Oxygen typeface family is created as part of the KDE Project, a libre desktop for the GNU+Linux operating system. The design is optimised for the FreeType font rendering system and works well in all graphical user interfaces, desktops and devices."

With its publication in the Google Webfonts repository, the Oxygen font (Regular only) is ready to go. So, if this is going to be the official KDE font, then it must be used anywhere, starting with www.kde.org and following with dot.kde.org.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Self explanatory. Visit http://dot.kde.org
Actual Results:  
The displayed font is Liberation Sans. Pretty, but has nothing to do with KDE.

Expected Results:  
The displayed font is Oxygen, the *official font of the KDE project*.

Comment 1 Myriam Schweingruber 2012-04-14 07:31:33 UTC

Since the font is available for use only since about 6 days, this is not a bug, but a wish.

Comment 2 Eugene Trounev 2012-04-15 21:35:09 UTC

Thank you for your concern.

There are several reasons why we can not use it as a web font of choice for the time being.
1) it's incomplete. I'm sure this will change in time, but we can't possibly limit the web to standard English only. There are always those who write in their own language and we have to accommodate;
2) it only has one weight. not a big problem for a desktop font, but makes it harder to make a distinction between headers and normal text on the web;

but none of those are good enough reasons
3) the biggest problem with Oxygen (I'm sure it will change) is kerning. The font is very narrow, which makes it very hard to read as letter jam into one another. To see what I mean go to google font repo, find oxygen and do a "pop-out". Try to read the sample text and note how certain letter combination like "rn", or "rr" look like "m" and "n" respectively. This problem will get especially noticeable on Windows and Mac which use an inferior font rendering sub-systems. This we simply can not have.

So the verdict is "no go" at least for the time being.

We will keep re-evaluating the possibility however, and I'm sure in time the font matures enough for us to happily switch over.