[OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> writes:

> Just a question, don't CSS have a font fallback mechanism so that
> one can set, say, Droid Sans followed by Droid Sans Cyrillic or
> Droid Sans CJK if he wants Cyrillic or CJK support?

If your site uses CJK, you'd probably embed a font that supports CJK.
If your site uses Cyrillic characters, you'd embed a font that has
them.  And so on.  (The internet can find a place for fonts with all
different levels of character coverage.)

The CSS fallback mechanism is in case the user's browser doesn't have
or can't use the first font you specify.  Even with @font-face
embedding this can still happen, for instance, if the browser does not
support embedded fonts, or if the server hosting the embedded font is
unavailable at the moment for some reason.  If you end the list with
one of the built-ins (usually either "serif" or "sans-serif"), the
browser can always as a last resort fall back on one of its default
fonts, which these days are usually fonts with pretty good Unicode
support (i.e., most characters are covered, and the ones that aren't
are generally obscure in the extreme or recently added or both).  The
browser's default font may not have quite the look and feel you want,
but it'll generally be legible (assuming the reader knows the writing
system and language you're using, but there's no technical solution to
that one, short of providing translations in every language known to
man, which is an unreasonable expectation for most websites).

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