[OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> writes:

> Well... thankfully the different $language-speaking worlds
> increasingly intermesh in real life and on the web, 

Increasingly, as in 0.06% of all websites instead of 0.05% like five
years ago?

> so "optimizing" for bandwidth shouldn't automatically result in
> consciously or unconsciously making users of other writing systems
> blind or mute...  

Nobody's going to be blind or mute.  They just might see a regular old
boring font that's installed on their computer, instead of the fancy
embedded typeface.  And actually, if the site doesn't have content in
their language anyway, the font difference won't even get noticed.

> Another *important optimisation target* to bear in mind is actually
> reaching a larger audience beyond the commonly-known writing

Most people can't do that, on account of not knowing how to write in
very many languages.

> A much simpler example would be when English speakers borrow French
> words with accents and so on... Optimizing that out so that it can't
> be used sounds like a poor choice in the tradeoff... Touché :-)

I specifically listed the e with accute accent on my list of a dozen
or so additional characters that should be left in, for exactly that
reason.  (Google was even more conservative:  they kept all of
ISO-8869-1.)

> OTOH no font family can offer everything to everyone, 

Exactly.

Not so long ago I was reading a blog post where somebody was
complaining about the lack of italics for Japanese writing.

You gotta draw a line somewhere.

Let me be perfectly clear:  websites that contain content in a variety
of languages SHOULD be able to get and embed unstripped versions of
fonts, with full unicode support.

However, websites that only have content in English anyway SHOULD if
possible embed a font that supports a relatively small superset of the
characters they might ever actually use.  The availability of such
stripped fonts is a boon to a great many sites.

I'm not saying websites should only be written in English.  That's a
straw man, and a particularly poor one at that.  What I am saying is
that websites that ARE written only in English anyway, which is a
whole heaping lot of websites, can benefit from using stripped-down
versions of embeddable fonts, as opposed to full-unicode versions.

And let me expand on that a little more:  since the Google Font
Directory fonts are not just ASCII but Latin-1 (plus Euro and maybe a
couple of other things), they're good for almost all websites written
in not just English but virtually any European language, and a good
number of non-European languages as well.  The overwhelming majority
of websites that need more than that are sites that need thousands of
ideographic characters in their fonts, which would *hugely* increase
the size of the font download for each and every person who views each
and every page that embeds the font.

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