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> A webfont can be efficiently small if it includes characters only for the latin script. But what if I want to write Greek? Or Korean? Or Tamil? Something semi

> A webfont can be efficiently small if it includes characters only for the latin script. But what if I want to write Greek? Or Korean? Or Tamil? Something semi-terrible happens then. Thankfully, (probably) the text will still be displayed because the browser will fall back to another font for the characters the webfont of choice does not define. This will probably be a system font, which means it will probably define lots and lots of characters for all scripts. But, terribleness will strike when the style of the fallback font is completely different from the style of the primary font. While I'm in the camp of `font-family: serif/sans-serif`, this paragraph strikes me as strange. If you choose a font for your own content on your own website, why would you choose something that doesn't contain all the characters you need? The fallback problem is most commonly seen on websites that host user contents where the user can upload some character that the website maker hasn't prepared to host. On a personal site that needs non-Latin characters, you either have to host a big font, or you relinquish control completely by setting `serif` and `sans-serif`. There really isn't much terribleness can happen, unless you mis-configure the language of your page. I'm in favor of the latter, because when I browse the web as a user, I've seen how many web pages are broken when CJK characters are mixed with Latin alphabet. The only sane way for me is to block all custom fonts on the web. I've configured my OS to display both English and Chinese in a relatively harmonic manner (not a trivial effort on Linux, to be honest), and there's a much better chance that this system works better than whatever the website wants to do.

morpheuskafka 5y ago
For a personal blog, the number of languages is likely to be no more than two or three at most (putting aside any comments or other world-writable parts of the page). So it seems that one could easily trim the font files to only the needed characters, or even load them only for specific articles that need them. The bigger issue would be a general forum where people can and do write in any known language. And not only would the site have to support the character sets, the admins would likely have no way of even knowing if the various characters were being displayed correctly let alone if the font had a good readability/seriousness in that script.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>While I'm in the camp of `font-family: serif/sans-serif`, this paragraph strikes me as strange. If you choose a font for your own content on your own website, why would you choose something that doesn't contain all the characters you need? Once the site is choosing their own font you are probably relying on non-domain experts to do the choosing of the font, probably a developer or designer. These people sometimes will think it works on my system on the language I have tested it on and not think off hand but does it work with all the characters that need to be supported. Thus when your site chooses not widely available fonts or builds their own fonts this is a potential source of bugs.

morpheuskafka 5y ago

For a personal blog, the number of languages is likely to be no more than two or three at most (putting aside any comments or other world-writable parts of the page). So it seems that one could easily trim the font files to only the needed characters, or even load them only for specific articles that need them. The bigger issue would be a general forum where people can and do write in any known language. And not only would the site have to support the character sets, the admins would likely have no way of even knowing if the various characters were being displayed correctly let alone if the font had a good readability/seriousness in that script.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>While I'm in the camp of `font-family: serif/sans-serif`, this paragraph strikes me as strange. If you choose a font for your own content on your own website, why would you choose something that doesn't contain all the characters you need? Once the site is choosing their own font you are probably relying on non-domain experts to do the choosing of the font, probably a developer or designer. These people sometimes will think it works on my system on the language I have tested it on and not think off hand but does it work with all the characters that need to be supported. Thus when your site chooses not widely available fonts or builds their own fonts this is a potential source of bugs.