[OpenFontLibrary] Google Font Directory

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Am I the only person who thinks that having Cyrillics ditched from
>> both Droid Sans and Old Standard is a bugger?
> 
> For most of the English-speaking world, having that stripped out is a
> good thing.  Think of the bandwidth, if nothing else.  Remember, these
> are intended for @font-face embedding, which means every single
> visitor to the page (whose browser supports it) is retrieving a copy
> of the font.  You want that to be relatively small if possible.
> 
> Of course, if someone in the Slavic world wants to host some public
> web fonts that do have Cyrillic support, that would also be great.
> Similarly, if Baidu or somebody wants to host embeddable fonts with
> Chinese characters, hey, good for them.


Well... thankfully the different $language-speaking worlds increasingly
intermesh in real life and on the web, so "optimizing" for bandwidth
shouldn't automatically result in consciously or unconsciously making
users of other writing systems blind or mute...  Another *important
optimisation target* to bear in mind is actually reaching a larger
audience beyond the commonly-known writing systems. We need to realise
that ultimately various people don't care about _blinding fast_, what
they want is _works in my language_ :-)

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 :-)

OTOH no font family can offer everything to everyone, it's down to the
efforts towards making the particular tradeoff(s) inclusive and not too
ethnocentric depending on the particular website... IMHO "why can't they
all use my writing system?" isn't exactly the best angle from where to
look at the issue. We are in a position where increased support for
lesser-known languages can happen as well.


Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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