Re: [css-fonts] Font family selection

Regarding this:


> Therefore, it’s only a problem with installed fonts. Which operating
> systems only include bold versions of preinstalled fonts?
>
> Users installing fonts at all is rare. Users installing only the bold
> version of a font is rarer still.
>
> That may be true, although I'm not sure.  There are a number of bold-only
font families in my Windows font folder, although I don't know if
400-weight versions of the same families exist.  Regardless, the reverse
(regular font but not bold and/or not italic) is much more common.  The
designer might prefer the browser to use a different font-family with a
true bold or italic, instead of synthesizing a faux face.

I had a similar problem trying to get browsers to use "black" fonts. It was
aggravated by the fact that some browsers match these as part of the main
font-family (e.g., Arial Black matches Arial) while some treat them as
their own family, and some couldn't find the fonts at all, all on the same
computer.  And any browser would find a match for Arial, even if it didn't
match the Black weight.

Liam's proposal, of extending font-face to provide greater selection
control over system fonts, is something I've pondered as well.  Web fonts
have become a huge contribution to web page weight.  It should be a goal of
CSS to make it easier to get typographically pleasant results from system
fonts.  That means making it possible to select operating-system-optimized
font families with true italics, bolds, and small caps.

In some cases, it might make sense to extend the font-synthesis property
[1] to include a value that effectively says "try the next font-family in
the list until you don't need to synthesize anything". font-synthesis:
fallback, or something like that.  That wouldn't help with ensuring that
you have a complete font-family of matching faces, but it would avoid
awkward mis-matches of individual fonts.

~ABR

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-3/#font-synthesis-prop