Hello,
is there any reason for the font change? It looks smudged and the spacing/kerning uses more space for providing the same information:
Greetings
Stefan
Nothing much to add here, just found it difficult to compare left to right in very low and very wide image, so I put them under each other. 2.5 is up, 2.4 is below.
What I notice is summary, age and checked columns have different widths. And with 2.5 indeed more anti-aliasing (less crisp), but also less bold and maybe 1 px lower?
If it looks good or bad depends on your used system/browser.
It is a different font family used thatâs correct.
The explanation i think is fairly easy, 2.5 is loading the font and 2.4 relies on the font the browser is showing.
The size and the other parameters are the some only the font family differs as said.
Old: font-family: Lato, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
New: font-family: âInterâ, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Font downloaded from CMK Site â /themes/facelift/fonts/inter/UcCo3FwrK3iLTcviYwY.woff2
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Remember: The screenshot is side-by-side in the same browser!
I tested: Vivaldi, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari. And the change is clearly visible in all browsers.
If i look a little bit closer i would say the new one provides a better contrast than the old one.
Old
New
I now have installed the fonts locally and Iâm feeling it is getting worse (top: 2.4, bottom: 2.5):
I havenât found any google-font-api-url. Initially the used font should have been âHelveticaâ on my system. âVerdanaâ and âArialâ are in front of âHelveticaâ now.
Old: font-family: Lato, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
New: font-family: âInterâ, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Can you at least revert the order? Then I will remove the TTFs from my system and live with âHelveticaâ. Otherwise it will be another task for ansible.builtin.replace âŚ
The color contrast is âgoodâ in 2.4 and âpoorâ in 2.5 (according to some color contrast/accessebility checkers). There are levels like âvery goodâ and âsuperâ above thatâŚ
The font is downloaded from your CMK server directly not from the net.
In theory the font files would be loaded and used for display, but if the url (fonts/lato-normal.woff) goes to nowhere, this is the result:
Hi @StefanM
thanks for the feedback. The font change to Inter in 2.5 was intentional - it aligns with our updated branding and Inter is specifically designed for screen readability and accessibility.
That said, weâve taken note of your observations around crispness and are looking into whether thereâs anything on our end (font-weight bundling, anti-aliasing settings, etc.) that could be contributing to a softer appearance in certain environments.
From what weâve seen so far, the difference is fairly subtle on most setups, but we know rendering can vary quite a bit depending on OS, browser, and display, so we definitely want to make sure it looks as good as possible across the board.
Weâll report back if we find anything actionable. In the meantime, if you have specific browser/OS/display combinations where it looks particularly off, that would be helpful to know.
Cheers
Tanja
@theyken Thanks for your answer. At the moment Iâm trying to figure out how the font is loaded. I havenât found anything in the source of Checkmk and the delivered pages. But when I install the TTF on Windows/Linux the appearence of the fonts change. I think the primary change is the order of the fonts. Helvetica was my previous first match. Now Verdana is chosen. When I install the fonts the results are becoming less different, but the contrast is not good in some places (e.g. the orange in the SidebarâOverview)
It seems installing the TTF is changing the font fallback order, which is why Verdana is now being used instead of Helvetica. This is also affecting the UI contrast in some areas.
So! We have found out that chrome font rendering on unix struggles with variable font sizes. We are currently working on shipping static-weighted files that should fix this. A similiar issue was actually raised in the Inter github. Will update you once we know more 
Thanks for your patience!
Cheers
Tanja
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I will also add that I am not a fan of the new font or the way it is rendered. These screenshots were all taken on Google Chrome 149.0.7827.155 on Windows 11. Using 2.5.0p7 and 2.4.0p32 for testing.
A good example is the âMaster controlâ section. With 2.4 there is a consistent 2 pixel gap between each toggle on 2.5 most are 3 pixel but one is 2.
On the left is 2.4 and the right is 2.5. Perhaps I am being overly pedantic but at least to my eye the left looks way better, even when not zoomed in to the pixel level.
Overall the new font also just generally takes up more space and thus removes information. On 2.4 on the All Hosts page I can see 37 host entries, on 2.5 it has shrunk to 35. On the service problems page I have a service that outputs a long summary, on 2.4 it takes up four lines on 2.5 it takes up five.
Checking the computed style for 2.5 shows:
Family name: Inter
PostScript name: Inter-Regular
Font origin: Network resource(21 glyphs)
and 2.4 shows:
Family name: Arial
PostScript name: ArialMT
Font origin: Local file(8 glyphs)
Changing the css to set font-size: 11.5px; and letter-spacing: .01px; got it closer to the same information density as 2.4.
Top is with .01px and bottom is with the default of .5px.
Also looking at the font on fonts.google.com there is something that is different as the inter-glyph spacing seems a lot tighter than when used in cmk this is just changing the font size to 12px and lining up the start of the 2 (top is fonts.google.com and bottom is cmk 2.5).
I donât think the Inter font was really designed to work at smaller font sizes to my eyes it looks âalrightâ at 14px but then it has even worse density. I think I would get used to it if the letter-spacing was tightened up.
This guy uses letter-spacing of 0, but his goal was to match the spacing of the San Francisco font.
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