Bold and extra font weights have no visual difference

[sujindl]

What happened?

1. Navigate to Collaborate tab of any project
2. Start chat; click on bold markdown, type a message, and send
3. Click on extra markdown, type a message, and send

Defect: There are no visible differences between bold and extra bold markdown styles. This may cause confusion between individuals when communicating.

Expectation: messages in bold are expected to have a thinner font weight than messages marked in extra bold.

Anything else?

No response

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Chrome

What operating system are you using?

macOS

[amyjko]

This is a hard problem, as it relates to whether the selected user interface font supports extra bold weights. If it does not, the font does not render with extra weight. That's a general problem with browsers and fonts and we'd have to design to work around it. Options include:

• Only supporting fonts with extra bold weight. (Takes options away from creators who want to personalize)
• Detecting use of a font that doesn't support extra bold and doing something extra to annotate the text, even though its not supported, such as a text shadow. (Not a great typographic experience).

The second option is probably the least bad.