[alecst]

I was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually switched away from it because the default font was small and I couldn’t change it. I wonder if this has been updated since. (At the moment, I’m hosting my blog as a static site with NFS. I go back and forth about wanting comments/email sign-up.)

The developers were nice though, and I used their source code to learn Django. Really grateful.

[olah_1]

I was wondering about the typography too. Specifically for multi-language support, the chances are high that you’d want something better than the one default font they provide. Not to mention that you may want to edit the language meta code if you are writing in a different language.

[sirodoht]

I built mataroa. Not sure if your comment is referring to mataroa, but in case it is:

I care a lot about typography and making a platform in which non-latin scripts can be read well. Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts. System fonts are most probably better than webfonts. They can define a large set of characters, including as many languages as they can, without caring about how big they get. This is in contrast to webfonts, of which all character glyphs need to be sent to the client—so size matters.

I've also written this text on the topic: https://nutcroft.com/blog/in-defense-of-user-defined-web-fon...

[ldjb]

Thanks for your comments. However, for certain languages it is important to specify the language in the HTML with the `lang` attribute. Otherwise incorrect glyphs may be displayed. More info:

https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/

[sirodoht]

That's very interesting. Thank you for bringing it to my attention! Maybe a new setting to set the `lang` attribute is worth it.

[olah_1]

That attribute could also let you easily group your users into different languages. If you wanted to add more discovery features or something and let people search by language. Not sure what your goal is around that. Maybe opt out of discovery by default or something.

[csande17]

Unicode was supposed to save us from language-specific codepages, but alas...

[JoshTriplett]

> Mataroa does not provide any font. Rather, it uses the end user's system fonts.

Thank you very much for this.

[chrismorgan]

Well, you do make one bad decision with your typography (and that’s the one alecst was remarking on with “the default font was small”): you set the font size to 14px, rather than leaving it at the default value (which will normally be 16px) or possibly increasing it a little (I reckon the decent range relative to the default is about 1–1.25em).

[toshk]

On my phone it's pretty small font and linegeight, and found uncomfortable to read. As a web & app dev I have no idea how to quickly change this, let alone someone less tech savvy. For old people often small text is a big thing. Maybe add few font enlarge buttons?

[sirodoht]

One can change their blog's theme (which is essentially a larger serif font at 20px) on the mataroa blog setting page.

[chrisweekly]

Ok but using px instead of rem is already getting it wrong. See https://every-layout.dev/rudiments/units/

[sirodoht]

Thanks for the article! I think I'm convinced—will probably change up some stuff on font sizes and container widths.

[quickthrower2]

That sounds easy to fix, just some custom css?