[css-values] ch units shouldn’t cause font downloads

[litherum]

Migrated from #3129

Right now, Values and Units says:

Equal to the used advance measure of the “0” (ZERO, U+0030) glyph in the font used to render it.

It’s pretty unfortunate that ch units can cause fonts to download.

WebKit doesn’t do this; it just uses the primary font, and if the primary font doesn’t support “0” then it uses that font’s .notdef glyph. No downloads necessary.

https://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/graphics/Font.cpp#L123

https://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/css/CSSPrimitiveValue.cpp#L661

In this comment, @emilio says that Firefox does something similar.

[tabatkins]

Yeah, it's not intentional that ch should cause the "0"-containing subface of a composite face to be downloaded. I agree we should clarify that you can use the "not-defined" glyph if "0" isn't present.

(Is ".notdef glyph" a widespread concept we can refer to?)

[litherum]

.notdef is well-understood, well-defined, and common. (It's just glyphid 0 in every font, commonly rendered as the tofu)

I'd propose making the spec somewhat flexible here, as I can think of a few reasonable behaviors off the top of my head, and we probably shouldn't prescribe any until we can do more research:

1. Use the font's .notdef glyph's width
2. Use the primary font's average character width
3. Pick another character that is renderable somewhere in the fallback list, and is representative

We can make the spec say something like "if the primary font supports the '0' character, UAs must use the width of that character, otherwise, UAs should use an approximation of it using metrics from the primary font or a fallback font" and we can link to css-fonts for a definition of "supports." Given that almost all fonts support the '0' character, this is probably strong enough to be interoperable but flexible enough that we can find the best fallback.

[emilio]

Per the links in #3129, looks like WebKit is using (1) and Gecko is using (2). So yeah, if it's not clear one is superior to the other making the spec a bit flexible makes sense.

[kojiishi]

Blink does (1) too.

Is ".notdef glyph" a widespread concept we can refer to?

.notdef is well-understood, well-defined, and common. (It's just glyphid 0 in every font, commonly rendered as the tofu)

.notdef is defined in Recommendations for OpenType Fonts.

[bradkemper]

Today I discovered that a ‘ch’ unit in Font Awesome Pro (a popular icon font) is zero width in Safari. So, I think the .notdef glyph is not a reliable thing to fall back on. Average width doesn’t seem right either, as icons in an icon font tend to be much wider than a zero would be. Maybe something like 0.4em? Or use the width of an actual space character as a fallback first, if it is available?

[bradkemper]

Frankly, I don’t see why it can’t just use the next installed font from the font list (skipping past fonts that aren’t installed, or that would require a download).

[litherum]

We shouldn't be designing around the requirements of icon fonts. People shouldn't be using them in the first place.

[bradkemper]

People do use them. That’s the world we live in, and need to adapt to.

Also, I don’t think this is unique to icon fonts. I suspect that the one I’m connecting to (which I don’t have total control over), has been subsetted to save bandwidth, to remove characters that are not actually being used in content.

In those conditions, why not just...

use the next installed font from the font list (skipping past fonts that aren’t installed, or that would require a download).

It seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do, as it will always eventually find an already loaded (possibly system) font that has a zero in it.

[kojiishi]

I agree there are some such fonts. I've seen them before too. I don't think ch needs to take care of such fonts.

[AmeliaBR]

I'd strongly say that calculating a ch unit (or ex, ic, etc.) shouldn't cause a font to download, but I'm not sure that should mean giving up the use of the 0 as the reference glyph.

Consider the case of a custom font with just a few special characters (e.g., fancy ampersand) as the first font in the list, with a regular web font or system font as the next font in the stack. Using an artificially calculated value from the first font seems a poor choice if there is a font available (already downloaded or on the system) with a 0.

In most CSS environments, there will be at least a default font with a 0 in it. And if there really isn't, the spec already defines a fallback (0.5em).

[kojiishi]

Finding a system fallback font is not a cheap operation; it requires an RPC call in Blink due to sandbox, and the style recalc pauses during the RPC. I'm not very happy to bake it into the spec when no browsers do it today.

[fantasai]

@kojiishi Is it a problem only for system fallback, or also for fallback through the list of specified fonts? E.g. if I have font-family: web font, local font, sans-serif, is it a problem to check “local font” for '0'?

[svgeesus]

Mainly, I don't understand why there is any issue. The worries seem to be

• using ch might cause a font to be downloaded that otherwise would not be
• doing a system font fallback for an unused character is a blocking operation

ch is defined to use the actual font that is used for rendering. The two things noted above would only occur if:

• the font actually used has no glyph for "0", AND

• the font actually used has no .notdef (in this case, it would be a faulty font, or the font subsetter was faulty)

Also, falling back to another font for the width of "0" or .notdef misses the point of using the actual font.

So my preference would be an ordered list of things to try:

1. the width of the "0" glyph. if it doesn't have one,
2. the width of the .notdef glyph. if it doesn't have one (and thus, the font is broken),
3. use 0.5em

No additional webfont is ever downloaded, no additional local font is loaded either.

[AmeliaBR]

@svgeesus That sounds like a good start, although your wording doesn't acknowledge that there may be 2 or more active fonts (meaning loaded & being used in the document) applying for the element. Would you would search for first the 0 and then the .notdef glyph in this filtered font stack of active fonts, or only use the first active font?

PS, has anyone looked into the other font-relative units & confirmed whether browsers are matching spec as far as the "first available font" being the first one with a space character available?