Update Roboto font to v2.137

[Eternal Sorrow]

Django admin by default uses outdated version of Roboto font, that has some visual bugs, for example, in light weight the right french quotation mark is ugly and cyrillic "щ" looks just like "ш" (see attachments).

[Eternal Sorrow]

screenshot

[Mac Chapman]

Looks like the webfont that Django originally sourced from hasn't been updated in a long time. I guess we'd need to generate new woffs from ​https://github.com/google/roboto.git.

• The commit that added the font to Django: ​https://github.com/django/django/commit/35901e64b043733acd1687734274553cf994511b#diff-29ba8bf0e3d3ed401111c144b1842edeR1
• Woff downloads, last changed 2012: ​https://code.google.com/archive/p/roboto-webfont/downloads

[Mac Chapman]

I've built the fonts from source and got this working locally. I'll turn it into a PR shortly.

[Tim Graham]

Could you document the steps to build the fonts here so that we have that recorded?

[Mac Chapman]

Yeah, sure thing. I'm looking at working upstream to just present the woffs somewhere there - it's possible that I'm just missing them but I can't find them easily available. For the sake of including a valid licence etc it'd be best to just grab them from an official release.

[Mac Chapman]

Right, I've got the best I can do here, I think. I've pulled the latest TTFs down from ​https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto and converted them to WOFF's using woff-tools.

PR here ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/10499

The readme at ​https://github.com/mozilla/zilla-slab contains pretty detailed notes on how to do this. I did this in Docker to avoid installing the requirements locally:

FROM buildpack-deps:stretch

RUN mkdir /src
WORKDIR /src
COPY . /src

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get -y install ttfautohint woff-tools

RUN \
    for font in $(ls *.ttf); \
    do \
        sfnt2woff $font; \
    done;

There's some chatter about web fonts on the Roboto repo ​https://github.com/google/roboto/issues/287 - I don't know a lot about fonts so I don't know if there's a good reason for them not shipping WOFFs as standard.

[Tim Graham]

Can you explain how you got the TTF URLs from the fonts.google.com page? Do you know what version of the font this is? (e.g. I see some version numbers at ​https://github.com/google/roboto/releases).

[Mac Chapman]

If you click "select this font" on Google Fonts, there's a download link on the menu that pops up.

The version of the fonts is in the TTF metadata: "Version 2.137; 2017" (which, helpfully, is not available on the Roboto repo). Looking into this, it looks like I can set a version when I create the WOFF file, although I have not yet figured out how to read the version from a WOFF file to confirm that it's been added. I'll see if I can get it into the file, and if that doesn't work I'll put it in the readme.

[Mac Chapman]

Oh, here's the commit that adds the TTFs to Google Fonts - that's something ​https://github.com/google/fonts/pull/727

[Mac Chapman]

The roboto devs just pointed me at the excellent ​https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper which absolves me of any need to compile things on my own machine. I'll push the legit Google woffs ASAP.

[Mac Chapman]

Right, I've used ​https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper to pull the v2.137 font files from Google Fonts. I now believe they're the same files as Google themselves serve. I've added a mention of the webfonts helper to the font readme, too.

[Tim Graham]

Nice! Which charsets did you select? I selected them all (not sure if that's the right thing to do) and it seems like I received different files than what's in your PR.

[Mac Chapman]

Hmm, I selected them all too - seemed sensible given that this is a cyrillic issue - and went for weights 300, regular (400), and 700, as listed in the readme.

Here are the files I used prior to renaming them to match the existing ones:

➜ shasum *.woff
3ea2c95e21cc88d82bb111c99883484c64d657db  roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-300.woff
e4774be50a91e83c4fdc647e27342d03a29fd215  roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-700.woff
96eca9934dff83a12371dd54fc6c1bf29256815a  roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-regular.woff
➜ ls -l *.woff
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mac  staff  85692 11 Oct 18:03 roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-300.woff
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mac  staff  86184 11 Oct 18:03 roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-700.woff
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mac  staff  85876 11 Oct 18:03 roboto-v18-cyrillic-ext_vietnamese_latin-ext_latin_greek-ext_greek_cyrillic-regular.woff

These match the files in my branch. What are you seeing?

(Thanks for your patience! I really appreciate it)

[Tim Graham]

Thanks, now I see the same.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In fb5dfd53:

Fixed #29832 -- Updated Roboto font to v2.137.