The default font used by Delta Chat for Persian text doesn’t look good. It feels old and not very readable.
If Delta Chat uses the Vazir font as the default, it makes the text much easier to read and the app looks way more beautiful.
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Hello there pal!
I don’t use Persian on me phone personally. But as I installed it for me aunt, I realized this. Then I asked if the default font looks ugly in our small group and others agreed. So I told them to open an issue. And Erfan did.
It’s just a default Android font, DC does not do anything special to set a custom font. If Delta Chat is not worse than other apps then I don’t think DC should ship its own custom font.
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My first response was “Surely it’s easy to change the default font on Android”. But after a quick search, no, it isn’t. There are some OEMs that add limited font configurability, but generally it is pretty locked-down.
On mobile Linux, adding Vasir is fairly easy. For Debian-based distros:
- search “vazir” in the page Debian -- Software Packages in "trixie", Subsection fonts to find the package name(s)
- run
apt install fonts-vazirmatn-variable fonts-vazirmatnto install the fonts
You can also install fonts using packages like “fnt”, or by downloading the plain font files.
So you could complain to Google that their default is ugly and get them to change it, I guess. Or complain to them about their lack of font customization. But the right place to fix this is certainly in the broader font configuration, not in each individual app.
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I think it depends on the phone, I have seem some Samsung (or Motorola?) devices where people customize the font and put even some odd fonts in the whole system, like a font that looks like manual writing 
Yeah, some mobiles add an out-of-the-box font-picker, but they often have a closed, limited selection, focussed on pretty Latin-alphabet fonts. Installing aftermarket software to add arbitrary fonts mostly seems to involve rooting the phone.
There may be exceptions, I did not attempt exhaustive research. But it seems the easiest way to address this is when buying new hardware. One can either find someone who ships Android with fonts one likes, or pick a phone that comes with mobile Linux out-of-the-box.
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I just checked. Except for apps created by Iranians, other apps use the same ugly default font, if they support Persian. It includes Wikipedia and WhatsApp.
With all this, is there a problem with using Vazir font in the app, so the app will look better for users having an Arabic script enabled?
Also Vazir is an open source font.
One problem is that the size of the app will be larger for everyone. The font release is a 12 MB archive.
Another problem is that I’m sure once the font is changed, there will be users who got used to existing font and will ask to change the font back and there will be new users who will just notice that the font is different from other apps and ask to change it to default.
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Would it be technically possible to select a custom font at runtime?
The setting for it would nicely fit inside the appearance settings.
Like if the operating system does not support changing fonts, the users would at-least have an easy way to change this. (much easier and risk free compared to custom ROMs or rooting their phones to change settings).
there is no plan to ship custom fonts in Android for any language, the system already provides one and user have to deal with that font everywhere, not to go around asking every single app to support some other font, user have to figure out how to change system font if possible, open the feature request at Android project or switch to other Android device that has support for changing fonts, it is out of scope of the Delta Chat client for Android to care about shipping custom fonts
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