Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

So, what’s the point of something being a “system font” if it isn’t used for display by anything in the OS itself? Does some first-party app use them, e.g. GarageBand’s first-party VSTs? Or are they just there to provide you options for styling your own text in Pages et al? (And, if so, why not make them visible in the Text Styles OS modal in such apps, with them zero-installed on first selection? They’re nigh-undiscoverable as it is.)

View on HN

I recently had Safari offer to download a font for me so I could view a webpage. Perhaps that’s why they exist?

My guess is that they are (or will be) used in Pages/Keynote templates.

Proxima Nova is very common on websites so from that perspective it makes sense to bundle it.

If a website declares a CSS @font-face rule that defines font-family foo, and then later uses `font-family: foo` in a style; and foo is also the name of a system font-family; do browsers then skip the @font-face "version" of the font and use the system one instead? Hopefully not bothering to even download the web font?

I've never run into this case, despite using web fonts a couple of times, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone attempting to use a font that's a system font of an OS as a web font.

But that seems like the main use-case here: knowing that at least macOS ships with Proxima Nova, you'd declare a dependency on the Google Fonts copy of Proxima Nova as a polyfill of sorts; and then the OSes that have it would use their version instead of needing to pull it from Google.

There’s a local function for @font-face that allows you to link a webfont to a locally installed font and it will indeed skip the download if it can find it.

Relevant: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...

Thank you!!! Learnt something today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com