Messages in this thread | | | From | Jonathan Corbet <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH RFC RESEND 0/4] Documentation: Web fonts for kernel documentation | Date | Thu, 02 Nov 2023 10:35:47 -0600 |
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Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:
> The problem > =========== > > Currently, the kernel docs uses system-default serif fonts, as in > Documentation/conf.py: > > ``` > ... > if html_theme == 'alabaster': > html_theme_options = { > 'description': get_cline_version(), > 'page_width': '65em', > 'sidebar_width': '15em', > 'fixed_sidebar': 'true', > 'font_size': 'inherit', > 'font_family': 'serif', > } > ... > ``` > > The problem is depending on the serif font selected by system, the docs > text (especially long passages) can be hard and uncomfortable to read. > For developers reading the docs on multiple devices, the apparence may > look inconsistent. > > The solution > ============ > > Uniform the font choices by leveraging web fonts. Most of people reading > the kernel docs should already have modern browser that supports this > feature (e.g. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox). The fonts are downloaded > automatically when loading the page, but only if the reader don't > already have ones installed locally. Subsequent docs page loading will > use the browser cache to retrieve the fonts. If for some reasons the > fonts fail to load, the browser will fall back to fallback fonts > commonly seen on other sites.
So my immediate response to this is pretty uniformly negative.
- If you don't like serif, tweaking conf.py is easy enough without pushing it on everybody else.
- I'm not thrilled about adding a bunch of binary font data to the kernel, and suspect a lot of people would not feel that the bloat is worth it.
- The licensing of the fonts is not fully free.
There's so much we can do to improve our documentation and access to it; messing around with web fonts seems - to me, at least - pretty low on the list.
I suppose I can ask people at the kernel summit session in a couple weeks to see if others feel differently.
Thanks,
jon
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