Font used for the website, to accomodate all languages

[AntouanK]

The font currently used, Lato, does not have character subsets needed from other languages ( greek for example ).
So those languages will default to Sans-Serif and the text in the page will be a mix of two fonts.
Not cool.

Maybe we should choose another font? One that can have the characters we need for a proper i18n website.

[therebelrobot]

I would suggest possibly a language specific style sheet that is included in the build for that language? Then they can @font-face include whatever font they want? I would probably want to restrict it to CDN'd fonts like Google Fonts to avoid the massive headache of font conversion and upkeep.

[silverwind]

There are versions of Lato with the full glyph set available:

http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/#download

These are quite heavy though, 300kB before gzip.

[Fishrock123]

Hmm, well we can probably do locale+english for each i18n locale, that might work.

[AntouanK]

@silverwind You're right. I'm wondering why they are not in the google fonts website.

@Fishrock123 Yeah, each i18n team will make a font with english + the subset they need.
So in CSS you can include that font only.
Or we can inline them with base64, to avoid making that extra call ( if you want to be performant for some reason )

[Fishrock123]

Or we can inline them with base64, to avoid making that extra call ( if you want to be performant for some reason )

That's not guaranteed to be more performant though. :)

it's probably best to have each separate and marked as cacheable for a long time. Gzip actually makes the inital data overhead smaller.

[therebelrobot]

+1 to not base64 encoding it. Though I still would prefer a CDN'd font rather than hosting ourselves. Whatever works for the teams, though.

[AntouanK]

@Fishrock123 the inlined text will also be Gzipped, right? :P
Well, difference is really small anyway.

[silverwind]

Google does offer a Latin Extended (latin-ext) subset, not sure if that's enough:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato&subset=latin,latin-ext);

[Fishrock123]

@silverwind definitely not enough, considering we have active Chinese / Japanese / greek / etc translations. :)

[silverwind]

Lato-Regular.woff goes from 323172 to 312473 bytes after gzipping, so not much gains there. Converting to woff2 might shave off another 20%, but overall you're looking at 250kB gzipped per font weight :(

[Fishrock123]

@silverwind woff is already compressed. :)

[silverwind]

Yeah, probably not worth gzipping it at all.

[AntouanK]

Forget the gzipping part.

All we (you) have to do is give the ability to every team, to include their font.
It's up to them to make a Lato font with English+whatever they need.

Then we can fight over perf stuff. :)