Forum:Site fonts: your opinion needed

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Now that we've all had a few months to live with the changes to the site fonts, I wanted to revisit the issue. How do you like the font setup in the wikia skin? Some people were initially resistant to a serif font for the main body font, and others didn't initially warm to all-caps section header fonts.

What do you think now of the overall typographic design of the site, now that we've been on this font scheme for a few months now? Do you think it looks better or worse than the default Wikia fonts seen on most other Wikia wikis? Are there things you'd change about it?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">20:31: Tue 11 Oct 2011 

I don't notice it, which is my personal definition of a good font. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:52, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

I still haven't really warmed to the all-caps section headers to be honest, I remain of the mind that all-caps online constitutes SHOUTING. I dig the rest of the design, though; the font is easy on the eyes, and the layout in general flows quite nicely. — Rob T Firefly - Δ∇ - 20:56, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

I'm also in agreement with Rob T Firefly, the section headers, while I understand they're technically not actually in uppercase, they are. With the even quicker preview window you more quickly see the difference between plain text and what you get, and the headings are one of those jarring things.

I also haven't really warmed to the purple/blue background to the edit box, it was one of the things I was happy wasn't working when we were having Firefox issues. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:13, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

I actually don't min the section headers, but if they ae changed to show upper and lowercase then please keep them blue and fairly large, unlike once when they were black and you could barely tell the distinction between headers. Can I also ask that the navboxes at the bottom of pages be collapsable again? Glimmer721 ^{talk to me} 20:51, October 16, 2011 (UTC)

Responding to these suggestions

Thanks very much for these thoughts. The big issue, then, seems to be the sectional headings. I've now changed them to all lowercase. The issue for me is that they have to be either all lower or all upper. The reason for this is that editors over the year have been very inconsistent with capitalisation of header text. Making them go all upper or all lower instantly provides a uniformity that simply can't be achieved by going with normal sentence case.

Of course, I realise that the MOS says that we should be using sentence case in headers, and that still applies even with enforced cap styling. It's important to have sentence case so that people can know how to perform sectional links. (Linking to Companion#Species and gender works, while Companion#Species and Gender doesn't, even though both provide apparent blue-links.)

However, I can't think of a quick way to make the bot enforce sentence case. There's probably a way, but it would involve writing a specialised regular expression for it, and I'm just not that regex-savvy yet. So the quickest, easiest way to make everything appear to be uniform is just to enforce cap styling.

We've had it all upper case for a while, so now let's give lowercase a shot. I'd appreciate your comments on whether you think this is an improvement.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">02:40: Wed 30 Nov 2011 

Lower case is worse than upper case. Uppercase at least has the aesthetic of a heading, lowercase just looks…weird and not a heading.

I sort of understand your annoyance by the inconsistent use of headings, but isn't that down to the fact we've gone through a fairly fluid/lax period where we haven't had anything written down as to how it should be?

Now that it is written down, spelled out and stated clearly can't we just have it upper and lower case and rely on people to understand the MOS? Education rather than bot enforcement? --Tangerineduel / talk 12:58, November 30, 2011 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Tangerineduel. All-caps online is shouty, but all-lowercase suggests laziness or squeaky ickle baby voices which is worse. Additionally, it forces bad grammar where proper nouns are concerned.

If we absolutely must have one or the other I'd suggest going back to caps, but I do think it'd be best to just leave it in sentence case as-written and educate users about the MoS. — Rob T Firefly - Δ∇ - 20:28, November 30, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, well, that was a swift and resounding "no", so I've switched back to the previous all caps. And to be honest, I think that's how it's gonna stand.

I am personally highly pessimistic about the value of education. It's been on the books for years that sentence case was the standard, but people routinely break the rule. Capitalisation is one of the hardest things to standardise, because everyone has their own idea how to do it. And in a sense, there is no "right" way, no English language standard. It is something which must be arbitrarily decided, in the same way that we have arbitrarily decided to use British English, to italicise everything that moves, and to embolden the topic in the first sentence of an article.

I'd hate to think what percentage of the 150,000 bot edits have been consumed with trying to enforce that rule, one section header at a time. If you look at magazine issue pages alone, you'll find the bot having a number of edits, going for each individual mis-capped section header. Thing is, people don't even use title case, which at least would be a standard of a kind. They'll cap whichever words they want to. And that means that the bot's only response — or at lest the only one that I can think of — is to find repeated section headers over a certain range of pages and change them, one line at a time.

The easiest thing is just to go all upper or all lower and create the illusion of uniformity.

That said, I do hope for the day when the section headers can actually be rendered in sentence case, and I will continue looking for that clever bit of regex that will allow me to enforce the standard in an at least semi-automatic way.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">06:10: Thu 01 Dec 2011 

Isn't education what practically everything on the Help page is about?

The style we've got for the headings is already the simplest it can be.

A lot of problems with titling are down to education and single editors doing mass-amounts of work. The magazines were/are done by one user more or less. So while it looks like a lot of problems I think it's just one problem multiplied 300+ times. A little education can go a long way.

While it may have been on the books, as I've said we've only recently started spelling it out to people and getting into an organised fashion where we care about this sort of stuff.

I am some what puzzled by your pessimism with regard to this quirk of our MoS and educating people, it's not as though it's the only quirk and not as though there are other things we have to educate people on. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:08, December 8, 2011 (UTC)