Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] limit local fonts to those selected by users in browser settings (or other browser chrome) (#4497)

> (Non-Linux-using) egyptologists will be fine. macOS, Windows 10, Android, and Chrome OS ship with font support for Egyptian hieroglyphs by default.

I can't see limiting people to a single font, and one that they have no control over, is going to work, either for specialised communities or for minority languages. Note for example that:

1. the repertoire for Egyptian hieroglyphs is expected to expand from time to time, is there a guarantee that available system fonts will promptly deliver changes?
2. does the system font you have in mind provide the coloured glyphs that egyptologists sometimes need, or the alternate styles they sometimes use?
3. do those fonts support the new Unicode formatting characters for arranging egyptian glyphs in quadrats?

I'm willing to bet that the answer to all of those questions is no, and that adding support is a hit and miss affair with long lead times, whereas the community has developed or is developing its own fonts in a much more timely manner.

As for using webfonts, the fonts used by egyptologists are large, ranging in size from around 0.5Mb to almost 6 Mb in size (and they will grow with the repertoire).  It's not always ideal bandwidth-wise to require them to be used as webfonts only, especially if you want to use more than one font per page.

**I'm not arguing against addressing the fingerprinting issue, i'm just saying please provide an easy opt out when people want to work with certain local fonts.** Don't take the Safari route and make it impossible to use anything but what the system offers. 

Serving fonts as webfonts may work more easily for many languages/scripts than for egyptian, but it does still add complications. For instance, if you are experimenting to find the right font for your content it will become tedious to have to create webfonts before you can test any font. And I'm hoping that, as someone previously mentioned, it would at least be fine to use local fonts through localhost.

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Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2020 13:02:06 UTC