Fonts

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

I've been looking forward to the new editor's appearance in the Windows desktop program. Now that it's here -- I'm not. Among major feature deficits is the removal of access to the full set of Windows fonts. The "What's New" post makes the point that "a standardized font selection means your notes will look the same everywhere." Yes, that's an advantage, in some cases. But I have thousands of notes written in the past, occasionally using something other than the default Tahoma 10, and I'm wondering what will happen to them. When I open a note in the new program, will the formerly default Tahoma 10 be converted to, say, "Sans Serif" at whatever point size the "Normal text" style is? Or will the fonts and sizes be left alone, to become badly intermingled with text in the new manner when I edit them? Am I going to have to go through some tedious font ritual every time I edit an old note?

All that is assuming, of course, that I ever update to the new version, which I see no reason to do. I can put in headers and extra highlight colors in the Web version if I want them, while saving the look and customizability of my existing notes. The new Evernote would be the only Windows program I have that can't access the Windows fonts. I rarely use Google Docs, but I do know that, though it doesn't have the full set, even as a Web app it has a far more robust set of fonts than the Evernote Web client. I'm looking forward to having more font styling in the Android app, but to pay for that by having this drastic cut in Windows is an unhappy choice. Perhaps those who've been testing or using the new Windows version can comment on the fonts experience and its advantages and disadvantages on the basis of experience, rather than just my annoyed speculation.

[Paul A. 621]

Dave, I am sympathetic to your plight. I can definitely understand your concern and frustration.

The reality is that most of the beautiful fonts available on Mac / iOS, Android, and Windows, are unique to each of those platforms. One of Evernote's strengths has always been their cross-platform support, and yet one of the weaknesses has been the fact that a note written with (e.g) a Windows font would render differently when opened on an iPad or an Android phone, simply because the original font must be substituted by another available font on the other platforms.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this issue. Powerpoint (at least back in the day) offered the ability to embed all the fonts used in the presentation right inside the file, so that a presentation would render properly on another PC that may not have the same fonts installed. The problem is that fonts are generally huge and therefore embedding fonts would massively balloon the size of the file, which was problematic to say the least.

Evernote's apparent solution is to restrict usage of fonts to a limited number that they are able to guarantee will be available on every platform (including, presumably, the upcoming Linux version).

Perhaps that list of fonts will increase over time. Perhaps they will one day allow advanced users to add their own custom fonts. I realize this doesn't help you now, though.

[doktorzirb 54]

They've just released the beta version, a daring decision

Getting back system fonts ins critical. It's preposterous to have to get out of EN, launch the Windows keymap utility, look for the greek letter you need, select, copy and then go back to paste it in your note, to say de least.

I support your point

[CalS 5,280]

6 hours ago, Paul A. said:

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this issue.

Don’t know if it is easy or not, but say I set a default font on the iPad of small and a default font on Windows of Roboto 10 with the expectation that if I don’t make any font changes in the note it behaves itself on both platforms.  Default doesn’t need to mean same font on both platforms, just default on both platforms.  Never have understood this one. 

[PinkElephant 8,111]

About fonts: Windows and Mac are both delivered with a set of "system" fonts. Legally they are part of the OS, and are to be used only with the OS they were sold with.

Practically one can go to the respective folder / library, copy the font files (either True Type and Open Font) to the other OS, and import them to be used there. Technically the Windows Fonts work on the Mac, and vice versa. I would never advise to do so, see my initial remark. But there is no software installed that would control whether a font was issued for this or that OS, and there is no DRM on the system fonts of both OSes.

For an iOS device it takes a little bit more to install a font. I use a free app called Fontcase that allows to install a font on an iOS device.

Another nice tool is an app WhatTheFont: It uses the i-device camera to take a picture of any text, analyses the font and tries to guess it. It will produce a list of similar fonts, that can be used to mimic the font. Often fonts are protected by copyright, some are pretty expensive, but usually there are other (free) fonts that are close.

Probably the largest free font library are Google fonts ( https://fonts.google.com ). Just be aware that they will be used for tracking (what a surprise ...) if you build them into a web site.

[Tim H 37]

OP echoed. One of the problems with cross platform functionality is that the user ends up with a minimal set of functionality bringing none of the strengths of an individual platform. For those of us who primarily operate in one platform, we expect (and can deal with) a different behaviour on a second platform - I don't expect my notes created for a big screen device to be the same on an Android phone. We will see how this develops...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

Thanks, @Paul A. and @PinkElephant. "WhatTheFont"--that about describes me feelings. 

I do understand that fonts go with OSes and that substitutes/imitations are necessary on other systems. And yet ... not only Google Docs but this very forum's software is able to provide a set of named fonts, whether from Windows or imitations of them. Hopefully Evernote's set will enlarge as time goes on. But this is definitely a significant loss in the Windows program.

Can anyone say yet what happens to an existing note's fonts when it is opened in the new program?

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

On 10/8/2020 at 1:33 PM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Can anyone say yet what happens to an existing note's fonts when it is opened in the new program?

I'd love to have an answer on this specific point, if anyone has any experience. In another post someone indicates that previously existing notes "look completely different" in the new program. Is that right? Will previous default or selected fonts be automatically transformed into the limited set available in the new program? Yikes.

[DMiddleton 302]

8 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I'd love to have an answer on this specific point, if anyone has any experience. In another post someone indicates that previously existing notes "look completely different" in the new program. Is that right? Will previous default or selected fonts be automatically transformed into the limited set available in the new program? Yikes.

I have just tried opening a note which was created over a year ago and when placing the cursor in the middle of one word this is what the toolbar shows:

It shows 'Mixed' for font and no size at all??
I can see how some peoples notes may look odd if they have specified older system fonts etc in the past and the new editor cant convert them to a decent equivalent.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

Thanks, that's what I see in the Web client as well. There, font choices made in the previous Windows program are not necessarily altered, but just identified as "mixed." Perhaps that is what will happen in the new Windows program as well.

[doktorzirb 54]

On 10/8/2020 at 7:51 AM, Paul A. said:

Dave, I am sympathetic to your plight. I can definitely understand your concern and frustration.

The reality is that most of the beautiful fonts available on Mac / iOS, Android, and Windows, are unique to each of those platforms. One of Evernote's strengths has always been their cross-platform support, and yet one of the weaknesses has been the fact that a note written with (e.g) a Windows font would render differently when opened on an iPad or an Android phone, simply because the original font must be substituted by another available font on the other platforms.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this issue. Powerpoint (at least back in the day) offered the ability to embed all the fonts used in the presentation right inside the file, so that a presentation would render properly on another PC that may not have the same fonts installed. The problem is that fonts are generally huge and therefore embedding fonts would massively balloon the size of the file, which was problematic to say the least.

Evernote's apparent solution is to restrict usage of fonts to a limited number that they are able to guarantee will be available on every platform (including, presumably, the upcoming Linux version).

Perhaps that list of fonts will increase over time. Perhaps they will one day allow advanced users to add their own custom fonts. I realize this doesn't help you now, though.

I see the point, I can understand cross-platform compatibility, thanks for your comment. In that case, a adding a "symbol" font would be a must for all of us dealing with science & engineering stuff. I often resort to copy-pasting entire formulae or to insert editable jpgs (now much easier with the sketching tool), but greek letters are unavoidable and it's a nuisance not to have them at hand.

[PinkElephant 8,111]

5 minutes ago, doktorzirb said:

I see the point, I can understand cross-platform compatibility, thanks for your comment. In that case, a adding a "symbol" font would be a must for all of us dealing with science & engineering stuff. I often resort to copy-pasting entire formulae or to insert editable jpgs (now much easier with the sketching tool), but greek letters are unavoidable and it's a nuisance not to have them at hand.

Plus maybe non-western fonts, right-to-left fonts, fonts with accessibility features etc. The world is larger than east to west coast.

With each added „must have“ font the chance to serve a similar output on all sort of devices is dimished.

Many fonts are not free to use. Even those that are delivered with an OS like Windows are legally bound to this copy of the OS. An App that wants to bring the same set of fonts to all devices probably needs to license them.

[doktorzirb 54]

2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Plus maybe non-western fonts, right-to-left fonts, fonts with accessibility features etc. The world is larger than east to west coast.

With each added „must have“ font the chance to serve a similar output on all sort of devices is dimished.

Many fonts are not free to use. Even those that are delivered with an OS like Windows are legally bound to this copy of the OS. An App that wants to bring the same set of fonts to all devices probably needs to license them.

yep but greek letters are used in engineering even in arabic, russian or chinese texts

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

7 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Plus maybe non-western fonts, right-to-left fonts, fonts with accessibility features etc. The world is larger than east to west coast.

With each added „must have“ font the chance to serve a similar output on all sort of devices is dimished.

Many fonts are not free to use. Even those that are delivered with an OS like Windows are legally bound to this copy of the OS. An App that wants to bring the same set of fonts to all devices probably needs to license them.

These are good points. In the Android app, right-to-left functionality was removed several years ago, and the demand to get it back was finally something that (as one user from the Middle East pointed out) was uniting Israelis and Arabs. But it never came back, and in the new version it seems unlikely that it will. Unless there are system-level settings in the various OSes that will permit it.

I wonder if the option to embed fonts or used fonts licensed by Evernote will become a Premium feature. <<Just rank guessing, no actual information there!!>>

[Mike P 2,641]

 

8 minutes ago, doktorzirb said:

yep but greek letters are used in engineering even in arabic, russian or chinese texts

In my experience all Segoe UI Symbol characters are correctly rendered. This includes greek letters. You would need to use good old Windows character map or an online resource like http://www.kreativekorp.com/charset/font/SegoeUISymbol/ to find the correct charaters but that is the case in the legacy version too.

[ARH63 0]

Just installed the latest (10.x) version on Windows 10.   The appearance is atrocious.   What a stupid decision on the part of Evernote.

[PinkElephant 8,111]

???

It was one of the most requested features before v10 was released to have the same look & feel on all platforms and devices.

Now you need to know and accept that the fonts installed on a windows computer are special to windows. In fact their use (even if they can easily be copied and installed on a Mac or iPad) is linked to a valid Windows license. For an individual this is chicken feed, but a company (like Evernote) would be faced with a legal issue if they took the fonts from Windows and simply installed them everywhere. It is the same with all other platforms.

So EN decided to choose a set of fonts the App can install on every client, and name them Serif, SansSerif etc. This to suit a user request, same look and feel independently from the platform and client you use to open an EN note !

Now repeat: Atrocious ... Stupid ... user request ?

[Daniel Slosberg 3]

I've tried to work with the new version but will be going back to the older version, in part because of the poor default fonts.

So to answer what I think is your question: no, the user request is not atrocious and stupid. The way Evernote chose to address it is. 

[MacsomJRR 4]

Have to say I'm really disappointed in the new font selection (or lack thereof) in the new Evernote app. I have to convert (for sake of consistency) entire notes to one of the 6 Evernote fonts available to use. It's neither daring nor clever to take away a key aspect of user preference when taking notes on a computer. How many users truly go back and forth between Windows and Mac for work? Were users really asking you to standardize the actual fonts? Or just the interface? Which makes more sense. How many users actually use such different fonts on both systems that they can't be rendered at least similarly on the other? 

Bizarre choice Evernote. 

[PinkElephant 8,111]

• How many switch between a Windows PC and Android ?
• How many between a Mac and an iPhone ?
• Same for PC and iPad / iPhone ?
• Mac and Android ?
• and hello, I am switching between PC and Mac (so count at least one user that does)
• and the web client ...
• in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave ...

At the end we probably talk about anything in the direction of 90 - 100% that are cross platform, with today’s mobile devices penetration. So if you want an interface that works for all, wherever, you need to pick a standard font (or some), and deliver them with the app.

Which is what they have done, solving a long standing user complaint about every note looking different when opened on different devices.

Maybe EN should offer for those who want it a font design package - for tripple subscription charges, to make up for the font licensing. Then anybody can decide between complaining about missing fonts or excessive prices (my marketing professor always said, give users a choice).

IMHO is is very simple: A note taking app is no page design app, and no word processor. Use the right tool to do a job, instead of wishing every tool to be bloatware. V10 is bloaty enough if I look at the computer resources it is requesting.

[CimpleSypher 1]

The idea of having notes look the same across devices is absurd, particularly in the context of "A note taking app is no page design app, and no word processor." Why make the app do what the user should do - use a same font across all of their apps so when they use an intermediary like EN they will get the desired result. Conversely, now that the change has been made everyone else needs to jump through hoops.

In fairness, it's not the users who requested this feature that are at fault, it's EN. The idea that a large section (not necessarily the majority) of the user base made a request to make a change to the app that ultimately limits the functionality of the app doesn't make sense. EN's implementation of the feature request is flawed particularly because they assumed that because a lot of people wanted said feature that it was good for the platform and it clearly is not.

About fonts: Windows and Mac are both delivered with a set of "system" fonts. Legally they are part of the OS, and are to be used only with the OS they were sold with.

Curious to know... if the previous statement is true, does that mean that EN has been infringing upon the sanctity of MS & Apple's font rights all along?? If it is true then we just have to wait for MS to purchase the competition as they always do.

[gazumped 11,665]

47 minutes ago, CimpleSypher said:

does that mean that EN has been infringing upon the sanctity of MS & Apple's font rights all along??

No.  The point here is that - as you note - fonts in Windows are licensed to Windows.  So the happy users who also use iOS and want their notes to look exactly the same on both devices could not have that particular slice of cake until Evernote got their own fonts and committed everyone to exclusively using them.  I agree with you - if you're looking for the same layout on a phone screen as you get on a big super-HD monitor,  use a page layout app that can give you the design bells and whistles (and fonts) you need.  There's absolutely no sane need to complicate a note-taking and curating app like this,  but (I have to assume) a majority of customers wanted it,  so here we are.

🤨

[PinkElephant 8,111]

The usual fonts are in fact licensed with the OS. For example no Calibri on a Mac, no San Francisco on a Windows computer. Usually when you open a document from another OS, one of these things happen: The computers replaces missing fonts by similar looking ones, it asks you whether to install the missing fonts, or it does not open the document.

Technically you can copy the fonts from one machine and install it on one with a different OS. It is a license infringement, but there is no DRM applied to fonts, and nobody will (probably) sue a user who does. But if a company like EN „steals“ fonts, they better have good lawyers and deep pockets. I used to work for a TOP 10 German company - they bought a license for their own corporate font and had it installed on all company computers, independent from the OS. Maybe just to make sure you could interchange PowerPoints without destroying the layout.

Fonts don’t come cheap: If you are a designer and buy a font (family), you can easily end up paying several hundreds of bucks to be allowed to use it for your work. There are fonts under a general license, like Google fonts. Super idea - unless you notice that these fonts are used to track people in the internet. So in the end if an app wants to use the same font everywhere, it needs to bring them along under their own license.

This does not say it is a marvelous idea to reduce font selection to these 6 options. But it explains why it was necessary to cut back on fonts to assure an identical appearance of notes in all clients. If one does not like it: There is always the chance to open a feature request ...

[Paul A. 621]

59 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

There are fonts under a general license, like Google fonts. Super idea - unless you notice that these fonts are used to track people in the internet.

With respect to Google fonts, Google claims they "limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently." Here's the full blurb as posted on their FAQ:

Quote

What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.

Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to our servers.

Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day. This allows us to update a stylesheet to point to a new version of a font file when it’s updated, and ensures that all websites using fonts hosted by the Google Fonts API will be using the most updated version of each font within 24 hours of each release.

The font files themselves are cached for one year, which cumulatively has the effect of making the entire web faster: When millions of websites all link to the same fonts, they are cached after visiting the first website and appear instantly on all other subsequently visited sites. We do sometimes update font files to reduce their file size, increase coverage of languages, and improve the quality of their design. The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: We only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser.

Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are, and are published on our analytics page. We use data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. This data is published and accessible in the Google Fonts BigQuery database. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google's Privacy Policy.

 

[PinkElephant 8,111]

Yes - what happens when your browser calls a web server - I assume no means to cloak your web fingerprint are in place: Your browser does tell the web server a lot about your computer: OS, browser, Screen resolution, ..... , installed fonts, .... Officially this is because it makes internet traffic leaner and faster - if a font that the web site uses is already installed on your computer, it does not need to be supplied from the web site again.

You can check tracking yourself here: 
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org

The combination of all installed fonts are among the most individual parts of a systems fingerprint. This is why they are an important brick to build tracking that does not depend on storing information (cookies) on your computer.

Which is exactly the source of income for Google - because they sell to advertisers access to those computers (and users) that fit certain patterns. To do this tomorrow, they must be able to identify your computer as the source of an internet browsing session or a Google search today. And to do this, fingerprinting installed fonts are among the prime methods. So Google gives fonts away for free - depending on the web sites you visit, the fonts will be downloaded, and your computers font fingerprint will become more and more specific.

[Paul A. 621]

That's very interesting @PinkElephant; thanks for sharing.

I did test my browser and while the EFF test identifies my installed system fonts, it doesn't seem to list any Google Fonts. Perhaps that is simply a limitation of that particular test and not of what is possible in general? If, on the other hand, websites are unable to query the browser for cached web fonts, then use of Google Fonts would not provide additional fingerprinting information.

[PinkElephant 8,111]

When I am testing myself results are always a bit special. My browsers are all set up against tracking, plus I run a Pi-Hole on my home network that stops even more tracking. On an average 35% of my internet traffic gets filtered away, all of which is ads or tracking. I avoid having Google stuff on my devices, as I try to keep Facebook away. So I never know what it may  look like if tested from a system that is less hardened.

Here is another site for self - testing, plus they go more into detail with explaining what exactly is used to set up a fingerprint:

https://browserleaks.com/fonts