[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #42166: Bundle fonts used by default themes

[WordPress Trac]

#42166: Bundle fonts used by default themes
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 Reporter:  stefannagy   |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  closed
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:
Component:  Themes       |     Version:  4.9
 Severity:  normal       |  Resolution:  duplicate
 Keywords:               |     Focuses:
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Comment (by stefannagy):

 Hi @dd32,

 > We also used to use OpenSans in WordPress admin itself, however we
 dropped that in #36753 in favour of system fonts.
 >
 > While I can't promise you that future default themes won't use Google
 Fonts if it provides the best user experience, know that it's always taken
 into consideration during the theme design process, and if anything, the
 fact we no longer need to use OpenSans in the admin should be a good sign
 for the future.

 I'm really glad you dropped OpenSans in the admin panel in favour of
 system fonts. But in my view theme fonts are a different problem – that's
 why I don't think that this ticket is a duplicate of #26072. When we talk
 about fonts in themes it's not a real option to drop them in favour of
 system fonts.

 The WP default themes seem to be designed for users with latin languages;
 in case of greek, cyrillic… charsets system fonts are used instead of the
 careful chosen ones. I'm quite sure that the reason for this is not
 because fonts are not so important for designers after all but because
 default themes are something like 'showcase themes' and it's just
 impossible to create a beautiful design that works for / with all
 different writing systems / charsets.

 In case of OpenSans you were talking about a font that supports many
 charsets (cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, greek-ext, latin, latin-ext,
 viatnamese) while in case of Libre Franklin and most other fonts used in
 default themes we're talking about fonts that support only two charsets
 (latin and latin-ext). Apart from that as I understand it today most
 browsers support WOFF2 and unicode-range subsetting.

 So I opened this ticket because 1. default themes are different use cases
 – with different alternative options (dropping carefully chosen fonts in
 favour of system fonts is not one of them) and 2. in the last four years
 the basis for decision-making changed.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/42166#comment:2>
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