Accented characters seem to use a different font
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I don’t know if the problem comes from my computer or from Duolingo, but it seems that the font used by Duolingo does not include the accented characters of Esperanto, hence they use a different font and it looks a bit weird.
Compare for instance GĜ, SŜ.
Has anyone else noticed that?
10 Comments
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This is because the font that Duo uses (I want to say it's Museo Sans, but don't quote me on that) doesn't include all unicode characters. It's a problem we've seen before with the Turkish course too. According to Selcen (Turkish Mod), improving the font isn't very high on Duo HQ's priority list. I guess we have to muddle through it!
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Actually I’m confused. According to the CSS they use Museo Sans Rounded, but in the official pdf describing this font (http://www.exljbris.com/pdf/Museo_Sans_Rounded_specimen.pdf) the special characters of Esperanto, Turkish and vowels with macrons are present.
Maybe they just have an old version?
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Oh, wow, that's a pretty complete latin font. It even has capital ß! I wonder why the characters don't work then.
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improving the font isn't very high on Duo HQ's priority list.
I believe Museo Sans is a proprietary font. They may not be allowed to alter it.
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But they could create a fallback font containing the missing characters and which could look similar to the Museo Sans font (right now it will fallback on the default sans-serif font of the operating system which could look very different).
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That's actually a really sensible good idea! Yeah... maybe!
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The thing is, if HappyEvilSlosh is right, (which I think he is), then that could be construed as copyright infringement. I'd think Duolingo is big enough that they could talk to the creators about making an addition to the font.
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Yeah I have. In the past when I've used the macron with Japanese and Māori to indicate long vowels it shows up: āa, ēe, īi, ōo, ūu. In addition the Turkish letters ğg, and şs. The font Duolingo uses isn't free (in the liberty sense of the word) so I don't know that it's possible for them to add them themselves.
I've also noticed the fall-back font is different for different environments. For example I see a different font used for the letters in the comment block than in the original post block.
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On my Mac with Yosemite 10.10 installed everything looks normal in Safari, but on my iPhone, in Safari, those special characters are bold
