Major font problem on viewed website

[bwood]

Its been a long time since I had a glitch with Pro+. I downloaded the most up to date version and started to work. I use the Open-sans font a lot. Looks good on a couple of variants. I've included screen shots of Pro+ with open sans, the preview from within the program, and what it looks like on a website. Check the "Mail In Campaign Underway" Its bold and hardly readable after uploading. I've checked all the styles - nothing extraordinary. Variants are Open Sans 18.
The puzzling thing is Open-sans text done before the Pro+ upgrade is fine. Wondering if anybody has some suggestions. I could try a new font? Can't figure it out.

site - www.northeastspca.org

Update - changed the font in question to 'arial' and no problem. But I hate arial.

Thanks all for comments.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Bill,
I just created a test page using Arial & Open Sans fonts.
The one using Open Sans created the following error when inspected. Don't know what it means but it's not present on the Arial font page:

[Egg Bramhill]

It seems an long-standing issue with either Open Sans or FF. See here

[bwood]

Thanks @egg. I concur. Arial and Tahoma are fine. The problem is in some sizes Open Sans is fine. I read something to do with kerning in your error generation.
The problem is occurring on chrome and safari. What a mess. What a problem. Some of the fonts have actually defaulted to serif.

I wonder if this will effect any site I’ve made with Open Sans. This is just a smaller site. Can’t imagine the work ahead of me in one of my larger museum sites.

[Egg Bramhill]

Probably best to wait for a Dev to answer Bill. Might be worth putting in a ticket.

[bwood]

I’m just trying to retrace my steps. Other than adding a slight animation to a couple of pages very straight forward. Other than the new update to Pro+ nothing new. I’ll try to duplicate the problem on a test sight as well.
I believe it may have to do with the size of Open Sans. Anything above 72 points was trouble.
I’ve converted most of the site in question to Verdana but it’s rather blah. I’ll send a ticket and see what happens. When Open Sans fails it swaps to the closest safe font (I think). I’m not a coder. Maybe @acorn will chime in.
I just can’t see this site failing after 2 years. Well. Live and learn.

[Acorn]

Bill, I haven't encountered your difficulty or @Egg's but it is possibly browser version-specific Very strange if it is FF, Safari & Chrome as that just about covers everything.

As to a replacement San Serif font, have a go with Manrope, https://manropefont.com, it's free, with ligatures and is Variable.
How well Xara can handle all these, I don't know but it falls back to legacy weights as well.
A web-safe font is Verdana but it looks a bit dated:



Try using MS's Character Map UWP to best see differences.

Acorn

[bwood]

Thanks @acorn. As I understand a bit of CSS. If I use Open Sans for headers, and verdana for smaller text, if the browser failed to load Sans, it would default to verdana. I’ve corrected most on the site in question with some really blah fonts, but I fear to open my larger sites in the updated Pro+. That being a museum site. Thanks for the Manrope.
I’ll have to brush up on CSS. I just have no idea why the font just failed. I have very little animation. Added one drawing from the content catalogue, and only on specialized font called Splash. Must be careful in the future.

[Acorn]

Bill, it appears to be an Opens Sans kerning table issue, in that the size of the generated table is bigger than the browser can handle.

It is nothing to do with Xara.

What I think occurs is the greater the number of glyphs (characters with decoration and scale), the larger the kerning table becomes.
Xara produces a WOFF2 compressed font file that allows custom fonts to be used rather than the just restricted webfonts.
Storing the WOFF2 file in the design output saves a call to a remote CDN server (and avoids Google tracking IPs - in XPro+v21.8).

Your could probably check that the glyph total is reduced in the WOFF2 file, using FontForge. This is called subsetting.

The bottom line is Open Sans chokes browsers, so avoid.

Acorn

[bwood]

Thanks @acorn. I can always depend on you. I’ll start to change Open Sans today and in the future. Glad it’s not Xara.