[css-fonts] Is it time for standard fonts in the web?

[verbessern]

I'm wondering, is it time to have some fonts standardized for the web. PDF for example has several fonts, that are always available in the viewer and its safe for the generators to generate PDFs without embedding the font(s) inside it. I'm not saying to prevent other fonts from usage, but if several fonts become a standard, then I think that many websites will move towards using them, to ensure a consistent view of their websites.

I know that there are "safe to use" fonts, but that is just the result of the "living standard" not a standard per se. The lack of standard in this, affects so many people, and so much software products that its unimaginable in size.

One cannot even generated a proper SVG file, because there is no standard way of calculating the font width. Any textLength/lengthAdjust tricks are just softening the fall, but not preventing the fall itself. Embedding and such are not really a solution, at least because of copyright issues and file size.

[Crissov]

This issue could be seen as a duplicate of #5065. It is at least related.

[svgeesus]

This has been proposed many times over the years and in general, the current solution is to provide downloadable fonts (web fonts) so that any site can use whatever fonts they wish.

In general, interest in having some standard fonts predates the explosive growth and wide adoption of Unicode, and a font that works for everyone simply doesn't exist.