adding webfonts (should I do a PR)?

[mireille-raad]

To use fonts on the web, the mdn documentation says that we need:

• eot
• woff2
• woff
• ttf
• svg

The mdn link docs have a link for a web font generator at fontsquirrel. That page has 18 trackers! It is also one more step for everybody.

Can I submit a PR that adds the files for the web? or would you guys do it? I can also add to the documentation how to use the font in webpages (self-hosting).

[tiroj]

The new build process for the STIX Two fonts generates both WOFF and WOFF2 webfonts (for both the CFF and TTF flavour fonts). At present, only the WOFF2 fonts are included in the fonts folder, since these are all that is needed for most modern browsers, and are the most compact of the formats. We can easily add the WOFF files if there is a desire for them.

EOT is pretty antiquated now, and was only ever supported in Internet Explorer. Unless someone is running an old version of IE, chances are that EOT is unnecessary.

SVG fonts were formally deprecated by the W3C.

[mireille-raad]

Thank you for taking the time to reply with a detailed explanation. The update should probably be for Mozilla's mdn article :)

Before I close the issue, do you think it is worth it to add to the documentation/README here how to use STIX in webpages (modern browsers)?

[tiroj]

Pinging @davidmjones re. the documentation.

BTW, the STIX Two fonts are going to be available on Google Fonts—at least the Text fonts, hopefully the Math font too—so that will be an option for some website creators.

[davidmjones]

Pinging @davidmjones re. the documentation.

I'd rather link to someone else's documentation on how to use webfonts in general, but if someone wants to write something appropriate, I'd be open to including it.

[mireille-raad]

@tiroj thanks for you comment about svg and eot fonts. I ended up researching this a bit more and updating the mdn article about webfonts:

• https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/3283
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Styling_text/Web_fonts

Hopefully me and the future web font users won't be as confused about how to use your fonts on the web 😄.

If you want, you can link to that documentation now that it is updated. I can also do an example here that showcases different typography settings for the web, especially with variable fonts. Let me know what you think.

If it is not much hassle, I think it would be great to have the WOFF font as well as part of the build process. I looked at https://caniuse.com/?search=woff2. I saw that support for woff2 in some older or mobile browsers is not that great. It will save most users from having to use a font conversion tool like font squirrel, but this is up to you to decide if it is worth it.

[tiroj]

If it is not much hassle, I think it would be great to have the WOFF font as well as part of the build process.

The build process does output WOFF files as well as WOFF2. They’re just not included in the distribution of the pre-built Fonts folder. If you make a local copy of the repo on your system, you can run the build process and get the WOFF files. In the meantime, I’ll ask @davidmjones to consider whether we should add the WOFF files to the Fonts folder.

[pkra]

@davidmjones asked me to comment.

Here are a couple of reasons why I would argue against adding woff v1 versions at this time.

• Practically speaking, I would not duplicate what Google Fonts will soon provide: once STIX Two is included on Google Fonts, woff and other versions can be downloaded from there. (Links in the readme should of course help.)
• The only notable browser supporting woff1 but not woff2 today would be IE11. However, IE11 is nearing its end of life with even Microsoft stopping to support it in its products. In addition, any Windows with IE11 has very capable fonts to fall back to, e.g., Cambria. It seems extreme to me to add woff1 at this time and just for IE11. (The same argument applies to very old Safari versions which are much harder to find in the wild.)
• Opera Mobile is also listed on caniuse as not having woff2 support. However, it does technically support woff2; only it's "data saver" mode does not since that mode delivers server-generated renderings of pages and those servers use the Presto Engine. However, Presto is so ancient that a failing webfont is the least of a user's (or developers) problems.

On a more personal note, I find the size of the STIX Two fonts to be prohibitive for use as webfonts - unless font subsetting is part of the workflow. In that case, creating other formats after subsetting is usually extremely easy.