Forum font

[MrBSD]

I give up

Im with you.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Like, who still allows remote fonts loading anyway?

Can that be blocked? I don't recall.

 

[MrBSD]

Can that be blocked? I don't recall.

You can, but some sites refuse to load if you block remote fonts. Just for testing, block fonts.google.com and watch how many sites refuse to load.

 

[Espionage724]

Like, who still allows remote fonts loading anyway?

Disabling it in the past broke too many button icons on various sites (even 2 I host )

 

[drhowarddrfine]

You can, but some sites refuse to load if you block remote fonts. Just for testing, block fonts.google.com and watch how many sites refuse to load.

That would be stupid on their part. How does one block it in the browser?

 

[MrBSD]

That would be stupid on their part. How does one block it in the browser?

Use inspect element function, see what gets pulled and from where, and then create custom uBlock origin rule. If its a remote location, you can do it via hosts file or via dnsbl in your firewall. If you have one.

 

[Espionage724]

How does one block it in the browser?

Firefox has gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled; uBlock Origin has a checkbox:

And button on extension icon (needed to click More once):

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Ok so no user checkbox somewhere.
I remember reading about the security implications of downloading fonts back in the day but I don't recall anything. I'm sure I have a doc somewhere about it.

 

[loveydovey]

Disabling it in the past broke too many button icons on various sites (even 2 I host )

That's the UI icons font. Supposedly, many sites use FontAwesome for that, but I can't get Firefox to pick up that font locally.

The browser should look for the font locally, if it can't pull it from the remote location, but I think there are quirks to that. So annoying!

Frankly, it's very bizarre that we can't easily choose to have most common UI fonts installed locally, disable remote fonts, and just use local ones.

If not for security, then for robustness - remote fonts are actually not typical fonts, they require execution; they are CPU hungry enough that older hardware may stutter a bit even when rendering them. I see it on Telegram Web, for example - disabling remote fonts make scrolling super smooth, versus with remote fonts scrolling is a bit laggy.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

The browser should look for the font locally, if it can't pull it from the remote location

It does.

remote fonts are actually not typical fonts, they require execution;

I am not aware of any normal fonts that do that

 

[mer]

Ok so no user checkbox somewhere.
I remember reading about the security implications of downloading fonts back in the day but I don't recall anything. I'm sure I have a doc somewhere about it.

I wonder if that was related to the "malware as PDF attachment" we have now.

 

[kpedersen]

Asking because I'm stupid on the "web" side of things.
Is that the browser requesting or "the browser is rendering a page and it's asking for a font type"?

It was admittedly sloppy wording on my side.

1) The web developer should be dictating generic family names in their html/css (not specific font names)
2) The web browser should then read these generic family names and requesting an appropriate named font from the lower layers (i.e Gtk+).

I configure firefox to use Noto Sans for "sans-serif", minimum font size of 18.
It sounds like the web page would be coded as "use sans-serif for the font" and the page should render in Noto Sans, size 18 if I don't have "allow page to select their font" checked?

Sounds correct and this is a good approach. Your explicit setting of the font is probably going to be better than Gtk's guess.
Possibly for maximum compatibility (since tables / flexbox is still the only guaranteed way to have perfect layout and not every developer uses these), I would recommend a common font like Arial (or something from the Windows core fonts), just because the subtle glyph shape / size differences can break some naive web "pixel perfect" layouts.

As a quick read, this is typically how fonts should be set on websites rather than via specific names.
https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp
You can see in the example a good fallback mechanism, going from most explicit (font name) to most generic (font family). Unfortunately I suspect some browsers see i.e "Times New Roman" and substitute it with something weird rather than allowing it to fallback. Though I have not looked into it too deeply.

 

[marq]

I suggest installing the following font meta-package:

x11-fonts/webfonts

It's a collection of common web fonts, and IIRC it changed how this forum looked. HTH,