Recently CSS for URLO has changed, resulting in different font-family rules between websites. IRLO uses font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;, while URLO now sets it strictly to Helvetica. Personally I dislike serif fonts, so the change was pretty annoying for me (yes, I know about user CSS). But even leaving my preferences aside, I think IRLO and URLO should use consistent styles.
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Though this isn’t necessarily the right difference to choose, it might be a good idea to have some visual distinction so that it’s easier to tell at a glance which you’re looking at.
Edit: It looks like internals has a light gray background on the top bar vs. the white here, so there’s at least a subtle difference already.
Are you using the "Material Dark" theme or the "Default" theme on both sites? Do you know when "recently" this change happened? Also Helvetica and Arial are both sans-serif fonts, so I'm not sure how you're seeing serifs?
edit: I suppose if you don't have Helvetica installed, then you might see serifs on URLO.
edit again: I just looked on our discourse dashboards, and URLO says it was updated 2 days ago and IRLO was updated Aug 17. We're on hosted plans, so we don't have control over this. I will look and see if there's a discourse bug.
another edit: It looks related to this change, but I don't see any bug reports about it yet on the meta discourse. I don't have time to write one right this second, if you want to, go right ahead. I'll update here if I file one later.
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I use the default theme. The change has happened several day ago, as you correctly found out in the updates.
Yes, probably it's the reason.
I think they fixed it, while fixing a different problem. I don't know when we'll get the fix though, on either instance.
Here's why I think it's fixed:
- Their fonts are defined in the discourse-fonts Ruby gem.
- Fonts have a "name" attribute and a "stack" attribute. Here's the relevant one:
{
name: "Helvetica",
stack: "Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif",
},
- In the original PR adding the base font setting, on server startup, there was code that wrote out a CSS file containing classes for the various fonts, but it used the font name attribute when it should have used the stack attribute. I believe this to be the root cause of the bug.
- One of the maintainers made a comment on the PR that writing out this file at server boot time was too fragile and it needed to be changed.
- In the course of handling the fonts in a different way, a reviewer commented about having the fallbacks for Helvetica. The reviewer also prompted them to add a test, which seems to have led the author to fix the bug.
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