text: Bold text is sometimes way bolder than intended

[chrisbobbe]

See how bold the sender names and topic headers are in this screenshot on the office Android device, compared to a better alternative:

Current	Better alternative

The "better alternative" can be reached in this case by commenting out a line in weightVariableTextStyle:

diff --git lib/widgets/text.dart lib/widgets/text.dart
index 1a80cee4b..04d001bbd 100644
--- lib/widgets/text.dart
+++ lib/widgets/text.dart
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ TextStyle weightVariableTextStyle(BuildContext? context, {
     // This use of `fontWeight` shouldn't affect glyphs in the preferred,
     // "wght"-axis font. If it does, see for debugging:
     //   https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter/issues/65#issuecomment-1550666764
-    fontWeight: clampVariableFontWeight(value),
+    // fontWeight: clampVariableFontWeight(value),
 
     inherit: true);
 }

It seems that the comment about "This use of fontWeight shouldn't [etc.]" has proven helpful: the use of fontWeight is indeed affecting glyphs in Source Sans 3. The "see for debugging" link is relevant, but I plan to replace it with a link to an upstream Flutter issue with the triaged-engine label: that's flutter/flutter#136779 .

Removing that fontWeight line would be sad; it exists for the sake of glyphs that can't be rendered in the primary font family (like Source Sans 3) and might need to be rendered in a fallback font that doesn't have a "wght" axis.

[chrisbobbe]

We've seen this on Greg's Android device, and (as screenshotted above) on the office Android device. I don't think we've yet had reports from iOS.

[gnprice]

Thanks for spotting this. I'd actually noticed that the recipient headers and sender names seemed bolder than I'd expect; but our source code seemed to clearly call for the same weights that Vlad specified in the design, so I figured that was just his design choice. Apparently not!

I don't think we've yet had reports from iOS.

(And in particular it doesn't seem to reproduce on your iPhone.)

On that upstream issue flutter/flutter#136779, it looks like the next step is to work out what the desired behavior should be when both a fontWeight and a wght variation are specified. So probably the next step for this issue is for me to try to move that upstream issue forward, by writing a comment that tries to answer that question.

[chrisbobbe]

Sounds good. Thank you!!

[gnprice]

This came up in a chat thread: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/48-mobile/topic/density.20in.20message.20list/near/1735059