Re: [PATCH RFC RESEND 0/4] Documentation: Web fonts for kernel documentation

[Jonathan Corbet]

Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@xxxxxxxxx> 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