> Fonts are relatively small compared to media ... a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. That may be true in the United States

> Fonts are relatively small compared to media ... a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. That may be true in the United States and Western Europe, where a typical font only needs to encode a hundred glyphs or so. But even Google webfonts begin to get rather hefty if you include Central European and Cyrillic characters. Things get even worse with CJK fonts that have (tens of) thousands of glyphs. I have yet to find a Korean webfont that comes in at less than a megabyte, and most common webfonts in my country take up several megabytes apiece. It's really annoying if you're on a metered connection, not to mention s-l-o-w to load. > We don't want to revert to text graphics. Of course we don't want to... but things are so bad in CJK-land that I once wrote a library [1] that automatically generates text graphics given a string and a font file. It creates a separate image for each word, reuses them where possible, and automatically adds alt-text for search engines and screen readers. So at least it's an improvement over old-fashioned text graphics. [1] https://github.com/kijin/imgtext https://github.com/kijin/imgtext