LW2: Gill Sans Mac system fonts cause visual typos due to being outdated

[gwern]

The current LW2 font stack for comments reads something like

"GreekFallback, Calibri, "Gill Sans", "Gill Sans MT", "Myriad Pro", Myriad, "Liberation Sans", "Nimbus Sans L", Tahoma, Geneva, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif

The Mac system font for 'Gill Sans' is extremely outdated and causes visual bugs that look like typos. This is bad, as it affects (all?) comments viewed on (all?) Apple systems, and should be fixed. (Such as by providing a fixed Gill Sans webfont, or dropping GS from the fontstack.)

There is nothing wrong with Gill Sans and digitizations have been regularly updated, but unfortunately, it appears that even on the latest Apple systems, they ship a Gill Sans digitization which is 22+ years out of date:

"Digitized data copyright © 1991-2001 Agfa Monotype Corporation."

That 2001 version was imperfect and has several bugs. The most obvious bug is the kerning is busted in several cases, such as ", A":

This leads to Mac users screenshotting LW2 comments which look like they have typos in them. For example https://twitter.com/alexjc/status/1627327758140334081 screenshots my Bing essay which has been going viral, and it looks like I wrote

To a language model, Sydney is now as real as President Biden, the Easter Bunny, Elon Musk,Ash Ketchum, or God.

(I of course wrote "Elon Musk, Ash Ketchum", as I verified by copy-pasting, checking the source through the edit button, and viewing it on my Linux Firefox.)

I've noticed this spurious-missing-space-in-LW2-screenshot bug several times before on Twitter, but didn't take notes because it seemed so inscrutable; I got annoyed that my essay was being shared with typos it didn't have, and so this time I brought it up with saturn2 & Said Achmiz because I was a little concerned about whether GW/LW2 were mangling something. They verified no, it's actually just that the Apple font is extremely outdated and has that bug (and presumably several others).

┆Issue is synchronized with this Asana task by Unito

[sipec]

oh wow this one has been bothering me forever, glad you made an issue for it

[michaelkeenan]

ugh I looked into the spacing before the capital A today. Looks bad:

The EA Forum uses Inter for comments; maybe LessWrong could consider that.