[phkahler]

>> Let me know if you have any questions!

If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts?

If this is for publishing in .pdf format I can understand. If it's for web, I just don't get it.

[sanderjd]

Because ~no users curate their fonts, and making your site look better for the ~all users who don't curate their own fonts is the better more pragmatic choice by such a large margin that it isn't really worth much thought.

Does this negatively affect your experience? Can't you override fonts if you want to?

Edit: note, I'm not the person the question was directed at, and have no connection to the federalist project at all.

[GalacticDomin8r]

Every time I've visited a site where I thought, oh that's a terrible font, it's been basically one of these reasons:

  * Improper selection of default font for constrained display eg tabular
  * Or the more popular "Let's create a font because we can.  It's branding."

There are of course other considerations involved like the increasing diversity of rendering devices, but that doesn't make the fact that any web site font issue is nearly always the fault of the web site operator.

I can't recall any instance of "oh, that website with a great custom font is so appealing I'm going regularly and voraciously consume its content". The opposite of that is true though.

[iSnow]

I know there have been a couple of occurrences where I dropped into the web dev tools to see which font a site was using because they used beautifully, fitting fonts.

[webmaven]

Properly selected, fonts contribute to the user experience so seamlessly that most users don't even realize that the font used is something out of the ordinary.

This is similar in effect to users liking a site more when it is faster, but attributing the improvement to any number of other things that haven't actually changed.

[fanf2]

Web fonts are very slow

[admax88q]

On the list of things that make most sites slow. Web fonts is pretty low. Moh tajns if shitty JavaScript is a much bigger problem.

[earthboundkid]

If you use link rel preload and font-display: optional, it's fine.

[mortenjorck]

This is an interesting perspective, and one that could only exist in the past few decades.

For millennia, of course, the written word would appear in the particular style of an individual scribe, and might take on an entirely different look when copied by another. Gutenberg’s movable type introduced the concept of a text appearing exactly the same across multiple copies, something that has persisted for centuries through lead type, phototypesetting, and into PDFs. Only with the advent of information technology in the 20th century did the idea arise of text appearing in formats other than those chosen by its publisher, advanced by technologies such as TeX and HTML.

In the latter’s case, however, the original idea of a platonically structured document to be interpreted per the user’s preferences has long since been superseded by a return to the concept of the publisher defining the presentation. Client CSS never caught on, while server CSS took over.

[motivated_gear]

I would argue that a font is a part of an organization's brand. I think publishers like Airbnb and google have built around Cereal and roboto respectively.

[noelsusman]

Users don't select their preferred font in their own browser. That's pretty much the end of it.

[kchr]

Some of us do, and that's probably the best lifehack I've found so far.

Enforcing the same font and size across all pages is ergonomic and does lower the cognitive overhead of recalibrating your sight-reading for every new page you visit. Just my two cents...