Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Today I added the ability to see which fonts in a fontlist are the actual matches. For font names whose font list does not exactly match the font name, it will appear in a DETAILS box you can click on to see the individual fonts in the font list. Each one matching a font will show up correctly, and each one that isn't a match will show up in cursive. I have not added the ability to select a specific font from a fontlist, though I might later.

I have also fixed up the CSS to display input elements at a size matching the font size.

I changed the code each page runs for using the selected fonts. Instead of placing the font code in CSS files and the header.php script, it now goes in the headcode.php script. This script adds code to the HEAD section of each page. I did this so that I can use PHP to selectively choose which Google fonts to load. This will allow the selection of different Google fonts besides the default selections, and it will allow you to avoid loading any Google fonts if you prefer to use installed fonts. If you aren't satisfied with the provided font selections, this also allows you to set your choices to serif, sans-serif, and mono and then go to your browser's settings to set each of these to any font you have.

With this change in how the font settings work, I now need to make changes to the font selections. I will be adding select fonts from Google fonts, and I will be reducing the installed fonts you can choose from. For the sake of reducing unavailable selections, it's probably best to remove fonts that are not well-represented among different platforms. My current testing platforms are my Windows 11 PC, Linux Mint on Virtualbox, my iPad, my Kindle Scribe, my Fire tablet, an Android tablet, and my Likebook Mars. In another comment, I will make records of which platforms support each font choice.

Since the Likebook Mars and Linux Mint would have the same initials, they are identified as Mars and Mint. The Linux Mint fonts include some I was able to install. For Windows, I decided to use my Laptop, which doesn't have a bunch of extra fonts installed like my desktop does. I did not check for Literata, STIX Two Text, Noto Sans, or Courier Prime, since these are loaded from Google.

Palatino - 7: Mars, F, Mint, A, K, i, W
Baskerville - 6: Mars, F, Mint, A, K, i
Georgia - 6: Mars, F, Mint, A, i, W
Times - 5: Mars, F, Mint, A, i
Bookerly - 2: F, K
Bookman - Mint
Century Schoolbook - Mint
Garamond - Mint
Caecilia - K
Charter - i
Iowan Old Style - i
Rockwell - i
Cambria - W
Constantia - W

Helvetica - 7: Mars, F, Mint, A, K, i, W
Arial - 6: Mars, F, Mint, A, i, W
Verdana - 6: Mars, F, Mint, A, i, W
Tahoma - 3: Mars, A, W
Trebuchet - 3: Mint, i, W
Amazon Ember - 2: F, K
Roboto - 2: F, W
Calibri - 2: Mint, W
Franklin Gothic - 2: Mint, W
Futura - 2: K, i
Avant Garde - Mint
Optima - Mint
Ubuntu - Mint
Avenir - i
Gill Sans - i
Arial Black - W
Candara - W
Segoe UI - W

Courier - 6: Mars, F, Mint, A, i, W
Source Code Pro - F
Andale Mono - Mint
Fira Code - Mint
Free Mono - Mint
Liberation Mono - Mint
American Typewriter - i
Menlo - i
Consolas - W
Lucida Console - W

The following were not represented: Crimson, Lora, Roboto Slab, Source Serif Pro, Volkhov, Vollkorn, Fira Sans, Lexend, Radio Canada, San Francisco, Source Sans Pro, Cascadia Mono, Roboto Mono, Source Code Pro. Except for San Franciso, which is only on Apple, I believe the rest are Google fonts.

Boldface doesn't seem to work anymore. Neither in the main menu bar, not in the text in the Comments.

Boldface doesn't seem to work anymore. Neither in the main menu bar, not in the text in the Comments.

I am not experiencing that problem. Have you tried refreshing the browser cache?

I found out the font name to use for Helvetica on the Kindle, and I updated Helvetica's place in my data. Courier also comes with the Kindle, but I have not figured out what its font name is. But it appears to be what is showing up for the monospace keyword.

One further consideration with sans serif fonts is that they should represent the capital I and lowercase l differently. Despite not doing this, I kept Arial and Helvetica because they are both well supported. But I did remove Franklin Gothic, Futura, and Gill Sans, which are not as well supported, for not doing this. I am also removing Roboto Flex for not doing this, along with the other Roboto fonts. The remaining sans serif fonts use different characters for I and l.

Cascadia Mono is a Windows font, not a Google font. Since Courier is the only monospace font supported on multiple platforms, I will be including the best monospace fonts I can find for individual platforms besides Courier. So I might keep it despite not being supported on most platforms.

I am not experiencing that problem. Have you tried refreshing the browser cache?

Yes, this is after I refreshed the cache. The middle three K are bold:

KKKKKKKKKK

This is how it looks (FireFox on Win7):

The main menu bar looks like this:

Does the same thing happen if you try viewing the site with different fonts?

When I use the font settings form to select Times for the serif font (body) and Arial for the sans-serif (headers), boldface works in both:

Since Times and Arial should be on your computer, you shouldn't have any problem with those. What about if you try using some other Google fonts, such as Lora and Fira Sans? Does bold work properly for them? Also, what kind of results are you getting from the font previews on this page? These will show the full alphabet, digits, and common punctuation in regular, bold, italic, and bold italics.

I charged up my jailbroken Kindle DX to see what the name of the monospace font was on it. It was called KindleBlackboxC, and when I added that name to the Courier fontlist, it was recognized. It mostly looks like Courier, though its A, Q, and g look different. It turns out that it is not among the fonts I can select from for reading a book, and the only Courier I could choose from for a book was one I had installed. KindleBlackboxC is close enough that I will group it with Courier. With that, Courier joins Palatino and Helvetica for full support among my test platforms.

What about if you try using some other Google fonts, such as Lora and Fira Sans?

I did not see Fira Sans amongst the options I could tick, so I tried Lora + Noto Sans. Boldface is again not shown:

The preview after selecting Lora looks like:

I did not see Fira Sans amongst the options I could tick, so I tried Lora + Noto Sans.

The fonts are arranged alphabetically in multiple columns.

Boldface is again not shown:

It seems like you may be having a problem at your end with using Google fonts. I cannot fix this, but I can let you bypass it. I have added an option to use only local fonts. When selected, it will not write any head code for loading Google fonts, leaving you to use the fonts on your computer. You can then, if you like, install the default fonts and use your own local copies. Note that Noto Sans looks different when I'm using my own local copy. Mine is an old version using multiple .ttf files, but the latest version is a variable font. So I plan to uninstall the old version and install the new version to see if it helps. But first I'm going to look into updating the default font lists to include the most suitable fonts on each of my test platforms.

The fonts are all over the place for me on my iPad at the moment. Sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes serif sometimes san serif, even within the same page the font sizes seem to change. Like right now typing this in markdown mode in the comments, the font is tiny, used to be fine. Another example, the main page shows the menu bar with a bold san serif font, if I switch to another page, like the Interactive Diagram page, the menu bar switches to a normal weight serif font. I'm not sure what I can do to get it back to how it used to be

The fonts are all over the place for me on my iPad at the moment.

I have been developing the Font Settings with Windows and Linux Mint today, though I haven't touched anything to do with font size, and nothing looks unusual on my iPad so far. But I will test things out on my iPad further.

I am replying from my iPad. Things look fine. If you still have problems, let me know which browser you are using and your version of iOS.

Yes, things look much better, not sure what was going on. I'm just using Safari on iPadOS 18.3. The Markdown comment box still has small font size, but other than that it all looks normal again.

I noticed the small font size on both my iPad and my Android tablet, though not on my desktop. I corrected it by setting the font-size of any TEXTAREA in editcomment.php to 1em.

Yep that did the trick, thank you

Note that Noto Sans looks different when I'm using my own local copy. Mine is an old version using multiple .ttf files, but the latest version is a variable font. So I plan to uninstall the old version and install the new version to see if it helps.

I did that, and it did help. Noto Sans now looks like it should even when I'm not loading any web fonts from Google.

I have now selected Arial and Times, which solves the boldface problem. (But of course this might not be just my problem; we have not identified what causes it, and new visitors with a PC similar to mine might suffer the same problem...)

But I have the impression that it still looks significantly worse than it did when the default fonts were not yet messed up. This could be because the fonts seem smaller than what I was used too, which of course degrades their resolution. Hard to say, as I don't have any screenshots from last month. But where I first experienced the quality as 'good', I now experience it as 'sub-standard'.

Well, Arial and Times are not good font choices. Try setting your font choices to default while also setting the option to use only local fonts. I spent time yesterday carefully crafting each default font list, and it should at least give you something better than Arial and Times.

I’m also wondering whether you had any of the default fonts installed. When I was having issues with Noto Sans a while ago, it happened that I also had an old version of Noto Sans installed on my computer. Notably, Lora, which you tried yesterday, was the default serif font before I changed it to Literata. So maybe you had that installed on your computer too. Anyway, setting it to use only local fonts will let you see which of the fonts are installed on your computer. You could then switch back to loading Google fonts and see if you get the same problem with fonts you know are not installed.

Try setting your font choices to default while also setting the option to use only local fonts.

I did this, and it cures the boldface problem. I still somewhat hate the font I get though, because most digits there have the same hight as lower-case characters. This makes the zero indistinguishable from the lower-case O.

Which font is that? You can identify the font you’re using by checking the default font list for the first font that displays correctly.