Image for Facebook shares of "Year in review" statistics has incorrectly rendered (missing) characters

The image generated when you share your personal “Year on iNat” statistics on Facebook has missing characters (replaced with question marks). Those are non Latin characters - Cyrillic (“наблюдения” I suppose) and one Latin character with a combining diacritic (“ǎ” in my name). I guess the characters are missing in the font used to generate the image.

Attached is the generated image for my Facebook share. And this is my stat page where everything is rendered correctly (in Bulgarian as per my website settings):
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2019/exonie

safe_image

Sorry about that. I have a fix checked in that we just need to release, which may happen later today. The problem is that the font we use (Whitney) doesn’t seem to have good support for non-Latin characters and characters with diacritics. On the website, we fall back to fonts with better support, but for these images, we have to choose one font, and when we use Whitney, we end up with these question marks.

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Ok, I think the problem is fixed now. If anyone is still experiencing it, try re-generating your stats.

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Raise your hand if you are old enough to remember “web safe” fonts pre-CSS! :joy:
Thanks for the fix!

In defense of CSS, this is more a “problem” with imagemagick and the way we’re using it to make that image. The @font-face CSS rule provides a fallback mechanism, which is why we don’t have this problem with text displayed in HTML.

In general, though, yeah, I kind of wish we just used one of the web safe fonts

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