android 13 font

Stream: Zulip meta

[Kevin Buzzard]

I just upgraded my phone OS to android 13 and backticks have gone a bit weird for me. eee looks like this but still displays correctly. In thread titles it looks weird too.

Screenshot_20231210-233937.png

[Alya Abbott]

Weird! I forwarded the report to https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/48-mobile/topic/backticks.20issue/near/1699286.

[Patrick Massot]

I've always seen this on Android.

[Kevin Buzzard]

Here's the issue showing up in thread titles. Is this an android thing or a Zulip thing?
Screenshot_20231211-165640.png

[Jireh Loreaux]

Kevin, FWIW I've been on Android for years and have never seen this problem. My phone has been on Android 13 for months (years?) until just last week when I upgraded to 14.

[Anders Kaseorg]

It looks like you’re using an unusual font—do you know which one? I suspect it is misconstructed to confuse U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT (e`) with U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT (è), or otherwise has incorrect metrics for this character.

[Kevin Buzzard]

Ok I just googled for how to change the default font on android and I've changed it to another font and indeed my Zulip font is now back. Wouldn't it be great if there were a font that had no issues at all? Presumably this exists -- can I download it onto my phone?

[Kevin Buzzard]

Anders Kaseorg said:

It looks like you’re using an unusual font—do you know which one? I suspect it is misconstructed to confuse U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT (e`) with U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT (è), or otherwise has incorrect metrics for this character.

I am using a font called "default" by my system.

[Anders Kaseorg]

The actual default font on Android is called “Roboto”. I haven’t heard of a font called “default”.

[Patrick Massot]

Kevin, how did you manage to change that font?

[Kevin Buzzard]

On my motorola phone I went to settings and then searched for font, and it suggested I click on "Personalise" so I did, and there was an option to change the font to one of four pre-installed ones (referred to as "Default", "Android", "Slab" or "Square"). I changed it back to "Android" and now my phone looks like it used to look before the update.

[Patrick Massot]

My motorola phone seems to allow to change only the font size.

[Shreyas Srinivas]

I have this problem on my motorola phone with android 13 to which I upgraded ~2 months ago. Isn't it better for the app to fix a font within rather than ask users to tweak phone defaults? @Anders Kaseorg : This is definitely not some one off error as mentioned in that thread.

[Patrick Massot]

I agree to looks very unwise to rely on the system font, especially knowing that there are phones where you can't change the font.

[Anders Kaseorg]

I understand that you’ve run into a weird text rendering issue, but “very unwise to rely on the system font” is not the conclusion I would draw. If none of your apps relied on the system font, it would not be possible to have a system font setting in the first place, as it wouldn’t affect anything. Also all of your apps would be a few megabytes larger, look slightly different from each other, and be missing support for different language scripts considered unimportant by their developers, all for no good reason. Text rendering is one of the core responsibilities of an operating system, as it should be; this model has worked for millions of people running thousands of apps for dozens of years. So the conclusion I would draw is that it’s unwise to rely on a phone from a manufacturer who breaks text rendering just to look different.

If you want to help other users with affected phones, I recommend trying to reproduce the issue in other apps, to establish that it’s not just one app doing something funny (which I’m pretty confident it’s not), then file an issue with Motorola support.

[Shreyas Srinivas]

I am absolutely certain this is not an unfixable issue from the zulip end. While certain messaging apps like telegram and signal have this issue, discord doesn't.

[Shreyas Srinivas]

Also, surely "the app will take a few megabytes more storage" cannot be a reason to live with a rendering concern in 2023? Even budget phones come with 32 odd GB of storage. That being said, I totally get not wanting every app to do this. But zulip has good reason to include its own font, being an app that is used for more professional purposes, unlike telegram or signal

[Mac Malone]

Anders Kaseorg said:

Text rendering is one of the core responsibilities of an operating system, as it should be; this model has worked for millions of people running thousands of apps for dozens of years.

This is a very weird claim. Most professional websites and apps on most devices (since many desktop/mobile apps these days are just wrappers around wep apps) provide and use their own custom-selected fonts (with Google Fonts being one popular source for said fonts and Adobe being another) and only fall back to a system font if they are unable to fetch their custom font or the font is missing some characters that need printing.

[Eric Wieser]

I don't think it is Zulip's problem to work around a clear font bug upstream where an ASCII symbol renders incorrectly

[Eric Rodriguez]

I agree in principle, but Android font bugs (not this specific one) seem to have been around forever; accepting a really unusable user experience because morally this is an upstream issue is upsetting

[Eric Wieser]

I think at the very least it is unreasonable to expect an action from Zulip until an upstream bug is filed in some way!

[Eric Rodriguez]

(I was thinking of this bug, which must have an upstream filing by now?!)

[Eric Wieser]

(It does, and it recently turned 6 years old; so I think a downstream workaround is appropriate there, though it doesn't help with the same bug on github)

[Shreyas Srinivas]

Eric Wieser said:

I think at the very least it is unreasonable to expect an action from Zulip until an upstream bug is filed in some way!

It isn't. Much like discord and slack, they can package their app with a fixed font. It will add a couple of MBs to their 64.5 MB app which consumes 50 odd MB of cache in addition anyway.

[Shreyas Srinivas]

This will lead to a consistent experience across devices and operating systems.

[Alya Abbott]

The new flutter mobile up will ship a font and fix this issue (see here).