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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Caveat: Google Fonts, and by extension Fontsource which mostly just mirrors Googles files, strips out nearly all of the advanced OpenType features to reduce the filesize. It's worth checking the upstream version of your font to see which features it actually offers.

e.g. Wakamai Fondue lists 11 features for Googles version of Inter (some essential ones plus fractions, tabular numbers, numerators, denominators and contextual alts), while the full fat version of Inter has a whopping 44 features (too many to list, see https://rsms.me/inter/).

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it's the year of the lord 2024 and OSes still don't ship with a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode like nerdfonts. shameful.

I wish all the effort the big four wasted fighting for emoji supremacy would have been used to normalize a decent set of full unicode fonts once and for all.

Can't expect the big four to use their immeasurable wealth for the common good, now can we?

If anyone, then distro creators and maintainers will have to make that step. Google surely enjoys getting so much information due to hapless users loading Googlefonts on websites.

Which is why France's interpretation of the GDPR banned it

In some important areas France has better laws than other EU countries. Another example I believe was about avoiding wasting food on the supply chain of food to supermarkets and what happens with food afterwards.

> a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode

I am (clearly) clueless here, but isn't that what Noto's supposed to be?

Noto doesn't ship with OS, and users need multiple fonts for different use cases.

Grandparent comment is saying that Microsoft, Google, Apple could settle on a common set of open licence fonts and bundle them with the OS (and Linux distros / other OSS OSes could also do the same). Then web design & dev could rely on those fonts without having to locally serve them, or embed with Google fonts, etc. Noto could indeed be one of the bundled fonts in this alternate reality.

But no real incentive for any of those big players to do so, and disincentive for Google who gain surveillance data from font embeds as noted elsewhere in thread.

Although if you're not too picky about the finer details or being perfectly consistent across every platform, the system fonts are generally good enough nowadays to put together a pretty decent stack without having to resort to serving web fonts.

https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks

Even if you are using web fonts, those stacks make for good fallbacks.

Apple ships six Noto fonts (non-Latin alphabets) with the current version of MacOS.

first of, currently it is impossible to cover all of unicode because, surprise surprise, we still have page table issues!

the same char in zh, tw, jp, kr might use the same unicode id but have different glyphs.

secondly, yes, but even google fonts strip most things from noto it serves because they want the fine grain data of each site/user is using wink wink.

Proprietary OS problem. Linux distributions package and distribute all the fonts they're legally allowed to ship. Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories. And they don't strip out features either. I get to customize everything about Fira Code.

> Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories.

If you have to download/install them separately then it means it doesn't ship with it. The fact that you can install it from the distro repositories means nothing to a third party website that can't assume you have done so.

Websites can't really assume anything that's not a web standard. If this is important to them, they should be lobbying the web standards bodies to come up with a list of fonts that browsers are required to make available. Then the browsers will pull them in as dependencies when they're installed.

The Linux distributions did their jobs with excellence. The fonts are all there and installing them is a oneliner. The web folks made their own OS though so if anyone is to be blamed it's whoever is in charge of that OS called the web platform.

Who's in charge of the web as a platform these days? Google. Who is no doubt profiting from the Google Fonts thing.

correct. that's why I mention the nerdfonts as the holy grail.

but without the big OSes agreeing on a new unicode, today it's technically impossible to have a single unicode font (see how noto ships 200 variants on linux, all having some 500mb and only differing a few chars from one another. it's a monstrosity)

Wow, is Inter ever a beautiful typeface. A rare find when there seemed to be a glut of corporate NIH typefaces for a while.

macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin character sets, to the fluent readers of those languages.

The number of fonts that include even two good alphabets is pretty low. I have run into needing english and greek or cyrillic in the same document. I know of like three good fonts that have a good english and a good greek. My eye isn't as practiced at looking at cyrillic fonts but it seems even rarer for that combination.

Which honestly makes sense and there may not be a solution for. Different alphabets and writing systems have their own typographical histories and conventions. It's reasonable that there is a very limited design space where you're adhering to the conventions of two separate systems as well as maintaining interior consistency.

English is a language, Cyrillic is an alphabet, and Greek is both. The alphabet one finds in the range U+0000 to U+007F is called "Latin", not "English". If any alphabet has a claim on being "English", it's Shavian. (Found at U+10450 to U+1047F.)

thats the kind of nitpick that got us where we are today :)

if you're talking with users, you assume alphabets and map from the languages.

Inter quickly became my go-to sans serif font for the web. In A/B tests it somehow always looks better than anything, frequently by wide margins—which is saying something when you’re basically running through a dozen variations on Helvetica.

Wow. Do you happen to know if that just for API-based usage, or for downloads too?

> The Google Fonts API currently does not support requesting the inclusion of optional (also known as discretionary, or opt-in) OpenType Features, such as Stylistic Sets (salt) or Small Caps (smcp, c2sc). Instead the glyphs contained in these features may be published as a separate family… https://googlefonts.github.io/gf-guide/requirements.html#ope...

I think that might depend on particular font, but from what I tested, manually downloaded fonts do include OpenType features like smcp or swsh

Sometimes they might also ship outdated versions, e.g. the last released version of Fira Sans is 4.301, but Google still only serves version 4.203. Plus technically Fira Sans has been superseded by Fira Go, which includes additional scripts, but Google doesn't offer that one at all.

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