Hi all! I've updated the fonts sitewide to use a newer style. It's using a font from the Google Web Fonts project under an open license. The goal was to give things a bit fresher feel. What do you think?
New: fb2kPortable / foobar2000 (Apr 18, 2024), Platform 29.4 (Apr 10, 2024)
1,000+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
Please donate today
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
having sight issues as well as currently working on a 15 inch laptop I would prefer something maybe bolder or darker? But the form is nice just have to squint a bit more lol
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss
Was wondering why all of a sudden today I started getting a flash of underline without text on the Recent Posts page.
I think it looks good, although maybe size the font up just a touch in places where it is quite small (breadcrumbs, username, homepage link, date & time on posts, as it looks a little too small and sizes up quite badly using browser zoom due to these sections being so much smaller than elsewhere.
I still haven't tweaked those areas. Same with the footer and a couple others that are about 0.1em smaller than they should be. I'll likely be doing those tomorrow.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
All the fonts look pretty clear to me on a 15" laptop, but the menu bar fonts don't look as crisp as the rest. If it was a choice of the old font or the new font for the menu bar, I'd opt for the old one as it was easier to read. Taking a second look, what makes the new font look a little odd is that the top of the 'e' looks like it's too thin.
This sounds so picky, but you did ask.
Cambridge, UK
I didn't really notice any difference at first. I am tempted to say the old one was better readability-wise on my 11,6''netbook.Dont know how it looks on bigger screens. A screenshot of an old page would be nice.
EDIT: Got it. What is the Web Archive for, if not for comparing fonts?!? But I dont really see any difference there...
EDIT2: I was using my Ubuntu box and there was literally no difference. But now, on Win 7, there is. The new one looks fresher but I find the older one better readability-wise. Or I just have gotten use to it :).
EDIT3: Keep it the way it is now. I updated my firefox to 10 and now it looks different than before bvut I like it.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
In my opinion, the old font was better...
This font seems to be bigger and skinny than the old one.
To me it feels new, Fresh, and gives the site an eye candy feel.
Load the App and Play :evil:
I'm personally not noticing a change...
There is a change for me, things seem a bit clearer to read - which I noticed immediately in top menu text being bolder
From Google Chrome it's looks ugly. After seeing how clean it was in IE and Firefox, I thought it kinda weird.
At first, I thought it was a bug in Google Chrome (as I, too, noticed it yesterday), perhaps updating would do the trick. So I did, but the issue persisted. So I tried a fresh installation of Google Chrome on the desktop, same issue.
Here's a screenshot with all three browsers side-by-side:
http://screenshooter.net/5313111/wahprky
I personally don't like it. Not even zooming into the page fixes the issue.
What OS are you on? It looks just fine on my Chrome on Windows 7. Granted, Chrome's font handling is inferior to Firefox and IE overall, but it should look much better than that, especially since these are Google-recommended fonts.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
as always. I notice this problem with the words "chrome web store" as well on the upper left of that site.
It works just fine under Windows XP SP3 for me. Even in Windows Classic mode with color depth dialed down to 16-bit (the lowest it'll go for me). Something else is up for your box or install.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I checked the screenshot against the same three browsers on my work PC, and Firefox is a little off as well. This got me thinking it might actually be a system setting as opposed to a browser issue, and I have figured out how it can be reproduced.
Go to Control Panel->Display->Appearance and click the "Effects" button.
If the second checkbox ("Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts") is not checked, you get fonts that look like in the screenshot, if you set it to Standard or ClearType, it looks fine.
I tried both Standard and Clear Type. While Standard did get rid of a lot of the multi-weight line issues in Chrome's display, it left the fonts looking like they had varying weights of black and gray (but not of width) so that the lines hinted at having gaps. The Clear Type does not have that. Thanks for the suggestion.
I have undone the changes. I found that other windows were not as clear. Suggests to me that PortableApps should go back to the previous font, or a more compatible new font.
For XP you could try tweaking cleartype with the ClearType Tuner. Especially on lcd displays some settings including the default sometimes give strange results.
I think we got the same computer!
Here's a side by side of the same pages with Standard and ClearType.
Standard
ClearType
I am not sure if is related, but the rounded bar with the "Get the new PortableApps..." at the near top of every page, and also all the other bits, adjusts to the width of the window. However, the text in the body of the posts don't.
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
Have here some older install, XP on an old tishiba laptop, firefox 3.6.25
Text is hardly readable, it has kind of little contrast or the the contrast is changing.
on the same computer, using portable firefox 9.01 it is much better, but still not much contrast, reading kind of difficult.
On bigger screens it is ok, but on small screens difficult. Except on smartphone, well there all looks fine, regardless if using google browser or firefox.
----
tried just on firefox2 on w98se, here all very nice, however font is not looking the same, but has full contrast.
----
just arrived at an other of my XP machines, firefox 10, but the font is hardly readable.
Sorry, but this font is probably something more for w7, on XP it looks to be difficult to use.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
On my own laptop, which runs Ubuntu, I force it to use the Ubuntu font-family. For comparison I tried it on my machine at work, which is XP; with ClearType disabled, in Firefox there is little or no difference in Firefox with Open Sans, but on other browsers it becomes somewhat uglier. The Ubuntu font-family, however, has been done properly with this case in mind and so continues to look good with ClearType or with the default font smoothing (and even with no font smoothing at all), in the same way that Arial does. The Ubuntu font family is good. It doesn't look quite as good as it does on Ubuntu, but that's because Windows' font rendering is quite poor (and still is, even in Windows 7!)
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
My ubuntu box uses the Ubuntu font for Portableapps.com although I dont think I have told it to. I like it - its easy and readable.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
When I wrote the comment, the font was OpenSans; since then, John has changed it to Ubuntu.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
nice. I thought so but wasnt sure.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
I get very different results every day. I think, tweaking the font size and weight is still ongoing. Until yesterday the paragraph font was a bit tiny on my 120dpi notebook and rendered in italics on my smartphone. Today the font seems a bit bigger on my notebook and is easier to read. On my smartphone it now is rendered bold, though.
I also get very different results. Two Win 7 machines plus an XP notebook have no problems with the new font. An XP desktop with an LG flat panel LCD display looks poor. In all cases I am using Google Chrome. There seems to be a lot of variables at play here: operating system, browser, display hardware, etc.
Given that so many folks are having problems with this, why stick with it? My vote is to go back to what seemed to work for everyone.
My more recent multiboot computer behaves with firefox 10 as follows:
w7: all looks fine
w7/xp mode (virtual machine) : all looks fine too
XP SP3: very hard to read, almost unusable
ubuntu : readable ok, could be better ,font looks very fuzzy, reminds me of the anti tempest font of pgp
the normal text has somehow very little contrast, it looks light gray intead of black and so for example in forum here, which has also light gray background apparently, the font is difficult to see.
Please use some normal font again, this is getting too difficult to use it at all.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Better get use to it. I don't think anyone is listening.
Ed
The sitewide font has been updated Feb 7, 2012. The new font doesn't look quite-as-good in modern browsing situations but will look better in Google Chrome's horrendously-broken font rendering when font smoothing is off under Windows (Firefox and IE will turn it on by default in their own app windows which allows fonts to properly render).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
When I first looked at the tracker ( my landing spot) I noted immediately a font change...or my eyesight had improved
I like it!
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss
can read very well on XP (two machines tested so far)
on ubuntu it is little bit fuzzy, but contrast much higher
fine on w7
in firefox and IE
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
On Ubuntu, this should be about the best you'll get, fitting in perfectly with the UI which uses the Ubuntu font. I'll warrant after a couple of days of using it, you'll be ever so glad of it.
If you wanted to go the whole hog, John, you could put textarea/code/pre in Ubuntu Mono. It's a great monospace font, complementing plain Ubuntu very nicely.
(On my Ubuntu laptop I force the body font to be Ubuntu and I force textarea/code/pre to be Ubuntu Mono... I tried it as an experiment and decided very quickly that it distinctly improves almost all of the web—the only exceptions are the very occasional page that was designed with the particular font dimensions in mind.)
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Much, much better.
It looks good on at least one of my browsers. As discussed above, I was sacrificing a lot of readability in PA to avoid downgrading everywhere else. Looks clean without the varying line weight issue I was having within letters.
Mostly I like the new look--it's "cleaner". But I don't really like the lack of a bold font in the "lists" (news, apps, forum topics and such). The new default font, however, doesn't look good when bolded there, so I've changed it [back?] to Verdana bolded [user CSS]. It brings my focus more readily to what I want to see first/only ("easier to read").
I'm also seeing some list title glitches, looks fine in dragon(chrome) ... too bold in firefox where underline merges with text & in opera 'Replies' takes up 2 lines
a tiny css tweak required?
or has the font changed again....seems clearer and crisper tonight? And No I did not get new glasses lol
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss