Non-Latin fonts for the UI

[nijel]

Describe the problem

Weblate currently bundles Source Sans / Source Code fonts which cover Latin script only. Any other scripts will fall back to the browser fonts. The assumption is that the user has fonts for the languages they are translating.

This might bring some issues, though:

• The system fonts might not look as good as third-party ones for some scripts.
• Users without these fonts will not see these texts rendered (for example, when looking at translations in other languages than you translate).

Describe the solution you would like

The solution needs to be decided:

• Should Weblate ship additional fonts? The size of Weblate package could grow considerably when adding a few fonts.
• Which scripts to cover? We probably can't cover all the scripts.
• Weblate already ships Kurinto font which is used when rendering PNG widgets. Maybe we could use this in the UI?

Describe alternatives you have considered

The current approach works well for most of the time and could be kept.

Screenshots

No response

Additional context

This issue is to get opinions about this topic. Please share your thoughts.

@Geeyun-JY3 @BoFFire @yarons @meel-hd

[meel-hd]

Should Weblate ship additional fonts? The size of Weblate package could grow considerably when adding a few fonts.

Given that we already ship the font kurnito, the size isn't an issue if we ended up using it also in the UI. Also if we decided to ditch source-code-pro and code-sans the size could even decrease. Assuming we use these two fonts for their look, because font-kurnito has many different typefaces we can use instead.

Which scripts to cover? We probably can't cover all the scripts.

In theory if users face troubles with other scripts not visible we should have a solution or additional guides in docs. However I don't think that's an issue.

Note that kurnito is designed to support many writing scripts, more than source-code-pro.

[github-actions]

This issue has been put aside. It is currently unclear if it will ever be implemented as it seems to cover too narrow of a use case or doesn't seem to fit into Weblate.

Please try to clarify the use case or consider proposing something more generic to make it useful to more users.

[nijel]

The Source Sans will stay because it's the font used by Weblate for branding purposes.

[yarons]

The font used on the Libreoffice weblate is pretty convenient but I think there are some Niqqud issues.

Alef is both beautiful and has no compatibility issues.

The OS default is usually pretty good, there used to be some open source mono font that was pretty annoying but I can't find it so it was probably fixed.

[nijel]

@yarons LibreOffice Weblate doesn't seem to have any customization in this (they have font-family: "Source Sans 3",sans-serif;). So it should use the system font for Arabic script.

[yarons]

@nijel So I assume it's Hebrew only.

[nijel]

Yes, Hebrew has a custom font there:

div[lang="he"],
textarea[lang="he"],
span[lang="he"] {
  font-family:'Assistant','Source Sans Pro',sans-serif
}

[nijel]

Assistant is a Hebrew extension to Source Sans, see https://github.com/hafontia-zz/Assistant

Adobe has some language variants as well: https://github.com/orgs/adobe-fonts/repositories?language=&q=source+sans&sort=&type=all

Using these for UI consistency would be probably great, the question is if it is worth of the additional megabytes.

PS: I just realized that the npm package for Source Sans (https://yarnpkg.com/package?q=source%20sans&name=source-sans) is few years behind as well...

[yarons]

I'm pretty sure it's unnecessary, maybe adding that as additional best practice externally so if the user will want it there will be a way to download packages for air-gapped platforms or download for internet connected machines.