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Screen shot sample

After upgrading to 14.04, any use of the 'Open Sans' on web pages renders in Chrome using a very 'thin' (maybe the 300 weight?) version of the font which is almost unreadable on Ubuntu - however, the same rendering seems to look fine on OSX/Windows as well as Firefox on Ubuntu. Any ideas what may have changed to cause this?

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  • Oh good, I thought it was just me. I can confirm this on Chromium. I can also tell that for the Open Sans family, only the Light Condensed and Light Condensed variants are available (there is a separate Open Sans Condensed family that looks much better IMO). Apr 17, 2014 at 12:06
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    By any chance, do you have my-weather-indicator installed? Apr 17, 2014 at 12:25
  • Did you tested 12.04 or 13.10?
    – Braiam
    Apr 17, 2014 at 13:55
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    @Braiam: I can answer to that. I frequently visited qt-project.org in 13.10, and the website didn't appear...condensed as it does for me in 14.04. I suspect the my-weather-indicator package (available in a PPA) is the cause, as it supplies the font, which is condensed. Also, this blog post suggests that the Open Sans font provided by Google is now condensed, and I suspect that's where the PPA maintainer downloaded the font from. Apr 17, 2014 at 14:16
  • @saiarcot895 that sounds like an answer. Have you tried to download the old version?
    – Braiam
    Apr 17, 2014 at 14:18

2 Answers 2

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This is most likely because you have installed the my-weather-indicator package, from ppa:atareao/atareao. The version of the font in this package is the same version supplied by Google Web Fonts, which now uses a more condensed version of the 400 weight (Normal). You can either

  • Uninstall the my-weather-indicator package, or
  • Download the Open Sans font from Font Squirrel, and unzip the contents into ~/.fonts (create the folder if it doesn't exist).
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  • This did the trick - great find. I'll see about opening a bug report w/ the PPA maintainer, as the 400 version here looks a lot better than what the PPA was pulling in: google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans
    – AvatarKava
    Apr 17, 2014 at 15:39
  • I should mention that I sent him an email about this. Apr 17, 2014 at 15:53
  • This is a per-user fix. Is there any way I can fix this as the website owner, so that Ubuntu users with my-weather-indicator would just see the uncondensed version without having to do either of the steps above?
    – Martin
    Apr 22, 2015 at 9:05
  • @Martin: It should now be fixed in the package, so a user fix should be no longer necessary. Apr 22, 2015 at 14:01
  • which version of the package was it fixed in (or a link to the bug would be great). I'm on 14.04 with the latest version of my-w-i but seem to still have the issue.
    – Martin
    Apr 22, 2015 at 18:12
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On my Ubuntu, "Open Sans" is just ignored by Chrome.. the font seems to be called "Sans" instead. If I add that as fallback on my site's font-family then I get same results as in FF/Opera etc.

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