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Comment by vox_mollis | Hacker News Reader

Reminder to the LE site maintainer folks:

http://i.imgur.com/jvp6a8M.png

Open Sans does not render very well on some platform combinations.

Edit: I should say your specific version of Open Sans. Your 14272-byte version of OpenSans-Regular.woff renders like this, whereas other sites' 21956-byte version renders fine.

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If you can't rely on a platform/browser to properly render a font as popular as Open Sans, it's really not worth working around it... I run firefox on Linux as well and don't have any issues. It's very likely on your end somewhere.

Edit: Do you get the same issue on https://leclan.ch/ ?

Interestingly enough, leclan.ch renders fine on my local system.

Edit: HN's VPN endpoint hatred is preventing me from replying, so I'll post here as an edit:

Not likely eot/svg. You and LE are both serving me OpenSans-Regular.woff - yours is 21956 bytes, and theirs is 14272 bytes.

I'm using open sans (locally hosted as woff) on that site so i'd say it's unlikely to do with the font itself. Maybe your browser has issues with eot/svg fonts.

Could likely be something to do with fontconfig on your system.

Any idea why? Seems like Open Sans ought to be quite well supported.

You can expect at least huge difference in how open sans bold text is rendered between platforms. On some (OSX) it's very very bold, on some other far less (font-weight bold/700).

Designing a harmonious and consistent UI under these conditions is difficult.

Out of curiosity, what platform combination is that?

Firefox 45.0.1 on Fedora 23 running Gnome 3 on X. Renders fine on Chrome on the same OS; renders fine on FF on a different OS.

But I've seen it break on other platform combinations too, though. If you google around stackexchange and the mozilla forums, you'll find others.

I'm using that exact combo, Fedora 23, Firefox 45 and Gnome 3. Basically vanilla Fedora 23. I have no issues.

Given how common that font is and how well visited that page is I think it's pretty obvious your system is broken.

Most of the times I've seen fonts break like this, it's because people have outdated local versions of the fonts installed on their system.

Can you check to see if you have the font installed locally, and if uninstalling it (or updating it) changes the behavior?

Firefox 45.0.1 on Arch Linux running KDE Plasma 5.6 on X here. The font renders fine for me.

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