Self-host our webfonts

[ikesau]

Currently we use Google to deliver webfonts with a <link> in our head to: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:300,400,400i,700,700i,900|Playfair+Display:400,600,700&display=swap

This loads a CSS file that requests several webfonts:

/* latin-ext */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Lato';
  font-style: italic;
  font-weight: 400;
  font-display: swap;
  src: url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/lato/v23/S6u8w4BMUTPHjxsAUi-qNiXg7eU0.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0100-024F, U+0259, U+1E00-1EFF, U+2020, U+20A0-20AB, U+20AD-20CF, U+2113, U+2C60-2C7F, U+A720-A7FF;
}
/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Lato';
  font-style: italic;
  font-weight: 400;
  font-display: swap;
  src: url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/lato/v23/S6u8w4BMUTPHjxsAXC-qNiXg7Q.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}
/* etc */

If we hosted and served this data ourselves, we wouldn't have to make unconsented requests to Google which are in violation of the GDPR and not affected by ours users' responses to the cookies banner.

[marcelgerber]

Oh this is interesting. Just a few days ago I went down a tiny rabbithole to check why 10¹⁵ doesn't render well with our Google Fonts Lato font. What I'm saying is that self-hosting Lato could also bring in other (arguably tiny) improvements.

It seems that the Lato typeface has in the meantime been updated to support the ⁵ glyph, but the Google Fonts version (on the left) has not been updated. The Adobe Fonts version, for example, shows this just fine:

[samizdatco]

Note also that the version of Lato posted here has additional weights that would be particularly useful for UI labels. It would be nice if we could get away with using the smaller latin-only variants but I'm not sure whether they include the niceties @marcelgerber mentioned above…

[ikesau]

Closed by #2518