- From: Henri Sivonen via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 13:15:53 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
> Does anyone have a sense of how big the set of useful-to-have-local fonts is? Even if just rough estimate, are we talking 1, 2 or 3 digits of fonts? Useful is relative. Before GUIs, Latin-script computing got by with one monospace font... Currently, the full unhinted set of Noto fonts has 1605 fonts that take 1.5 GB of disk space uncompressed. It's useful to have even more: E.g. outside of Noto, Chrome OS ships fonts that are part of or compatible with the 1990s Microsoft core Web font set as well as a couple of common-on-Linux Indic fonts from the Lohit set (I have no idea why the particular ones and not all Lohit fonts), and an extra Hangul font. For sure it would be _useful_ to have even more. (To begin with, even two weights for the scripts that now only have one.) But can some definition of _useful_ be fewer? Is it useful to have more than two weights? Yes, but how much does the Web rely on more than two weights being available locally? Probably not much and more weights are probably mostly a `@font-face` thing. Is it useful to have condensed versions? Yes, but again that's probably more of a `@font-face` thing. If you take all Noto fonts, keep up to two weights, remove the UI variants, remove Display variants, and remove condensed variants, you are left with 195 fonts that unhinted take 550 MB of disk space uncompressed. (The numbers 1605 and 195 don't really mean anything, since some fonts cater to multiple scripts and others only to one, and either way they vary a lot in size per font.) But again, the long-tail delta that macOS needed to catch up with Noto coverage is just 6.3 MB. -- GitHub Notification of comment by hsivonen Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4055#issuecomment-538392152 using your GitHub account
Received on Friday, 4 October 2019 13:15:55 UTC