'Open Sans' rendering differently on Chrome vs. other operating systems

Question

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?

Solution

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).

Comments

[saiarcot895]

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).

[saiarcot895]

By any chance, do you have my-weather-indicator installed?

[saiarcot895]

@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.

[Braiam]

@saiarcot895 that sounds like an answer. Have you tried to download the old version?

[saiarcot895]

@Braiam: The PPA maintainer only has one version for Trusty (coincidentally, that version is only for Trusty). Removing the my-weather-indicator package or installing Font Squirrel's Open Sans font in the ~/.fonts folder works. I'll post this as an answer.

[AvatarKava]

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

[saiarcot895]

I should mention that I sent him an email about this.

[Martin]

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?

[saiarcot895]

@Martin: It should now be fixed in the package, so a user fix should be no longer necessary.

[Martin]

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]

it seems my issue is with sans-serif now, looks different in Chrome vs. Firefox. Probably unrelated to this issue as I've removed the package. Thanks anyway :)