Element-web: Add option to change font

[tim77]

Apologize if this already asked but please add option to change manually font or at least using system default font option. Non-English font look weird and something wrong with kerning probably.

For example default font in Fractal app look much better and more readable.

[jryans]

Hmm, it sounds like the real issue is "UI font should look good for all character sets", instead of needing an option? If the current looked good for non-Latin characters, you wouldn't need an option, correct?

[tim77]

@jryans i want to say yes, "UI font should look good for all character sets", but in same time i still want to have option for font choice or using system font option. 🙂 Because of consistent looking UI probably.

Riot font is not bad itself especially English latin font family, but dunno. Feeling some kind of discomfort especially when mixing EN with non-EN messages.

[jryans]

Let's use https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/7949 to track the issue of the current font (Nunito) looking bad for non-Latin characters.

We can use this issue to track the idea of a font option in a general sense then, independent from specific issues with the current font.

[Yrr0r]

I suggest to use another font that covers more character sets.
Nunito has only European characters covered, when I type Chinese it falls back to SimSun, which is a print font and looks horrible on screens.
It seems not possible for the author to add Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters into this font, so instead I suggest to use font with wider charset.

Here is a nice one I found which covers almost everything: Sarasa Gothic .

[BrenBarn]

The issue is not just about picking a single font that "looks good". Individual users should be able to choose the fonts they individually prefer.

[bitrage]

I support the initial idea of an additional option. I would like to change the desktop client to a monospace font, to make it look more like a cli (irc nostalgia).

[hakavlad]

What about Noto fonts by default? Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard.

[aquatix]

This would also make it possible to have it integrate better with the desktop environment: it's one of the few applications that have a different font than the rest of my applications and DE. Also, somehow the font that's used is a bit blurrier than my system font, which makes me want to change it even more :)

[ghost]

Browsers already have font options for preferred sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts. I'm for removing all web fonts (including emoji #9790) and just have font-family:sans-serif;.

[mcodev31]

I work as a software developer and we use riot very frequently (especially now). Given the high resolution screens that exist today I would at the very least suggest using a default font where I and l are distinguishable. It isn't always possible to discern letters from context and needing to use code solely for that purpose is rather impractical.

[bwindels]

I'm working on font support for custom themes in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/4814 fwiw

[aquatix]

@bwindels that's really cool! It would just be nice if Riot would take a clue from the desktop environment to use its default font. If that is error-prone (which I can understand, considering the amount of different DE's like Gnome, KDE, xfce, Windows, Mac :) ), it would at least help me to have a font chooser.

Custom themes would be interesting of course, as I can tailor it even more to my current GTK theme, but it would be a bit overkill just for setting the font in the default theme, which I already find rather satisfying :)

[turt2live]

This is now supported in the appearance tab of settings under "Advanced"

[AgentOak]

@turt2live Is there a way to set a non-regular font?

For example, Liberation Sans works fine, but Liberation Sans Bold falls back to some default serif font. That is the name according to the Windows Font Settings:

[turt2live]

Please use #element-web:matrix.org for support, not old issues.