Description of the problem:
I have just uploaded an experiment to Pavlovia, built v2021.2.3. I have done nothing fancy with the fonts in the experiment; in fact, I have simply used the default “Open Sans” for all Text fields. On local, this displays as expected. On Pavlovia, however, the experiment is displaying in a different font (something seriphed).
From what I have read in the forum and release notes, Open Sans is supposed to be the default, so I’m not sure where to begin tackling the problem. Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated!
Thanks, @wakecarter, for responding so quickly! Is this because Open Sans simply doesn’t work consistently? (My experiment involves a lot of reading, which is why I was hoping to use the more screen-friendly Open Sans, if at all possible.)
To be honest, I haven’t thought about it too deeply before, and from a cursory search of the forum, neither has anyone else. I have often wondered why Open Sans appears as a serifed font online. I use Chrome. Maybe it displays properly on a different browser.
It’s a difficult problem - eventually, we’ll implement online the same system we have locally for fetching fonts from Google, but until that’s up and running we have a choice between Open Sans (which is from Google, so will work locally regardless of operating system and installed fonts, but doesn’t work online yet) or Arial (which works online as it’s “web safe”, ie packaged with most browsers, but isn’t necessarily going to be installed when running locally). We opted for Open Sans as the default as it will eventually work online and it’s freely available from Google Fonts.
Here’s a list of web safe fonts:
If you choose the most readable of these it will work on the vast majority of browsers. We’re growing our JS team too, and online fonts are a priority, so keep an eye out in the near future!
