Web Fonts – Challenges and Limitations
Web fonts have some limitations. Web fonts also face some challenges.
Limitations of Web Fonts
Any single web font has limited capacity and cannot support all glyphs and scripts, that are required to display text of a website.
Most web fonts support only one or two writing scripts; for example, a font may support Latin (English) but not Arabic or Chinese.
Most web fonts only comprise commonly used and limited character sets. For example, Concert One font has only 232 glyphs. Some fonts contain impressive number of glyphs, such as Lato comprises of 3031 glyphs, Roboto 1296 glyphs, Arimo 2594 glyphs. Update: According to Google documents, Roboto has over 3000 glyphs. “Roboto includes over 3,000 glyphs for representing languages around the world with a Latin writing system.” [RD]
A common font cannot support some scripts. Many scripts are composed of vast characters such basic Chinese script consists of more than 20,000 characters. [RD]
This is better explained in Microsoft documents,
“Starting with Windows Vista, the Windows core fonts contain support for most of the world’s writing systems including Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Thai, and each of the East Asian scripts. However, no single font contains all of these writing systems; most contain a single script and the basic Latin characters.”
This is the reason that you should use a web font according to the requirement of text on your web page – for example a Latin font is enough if most of your content is written in English language. System fonts of each operating system come to rescue our primary web fonts when required.
Typography Challenges of Web Fonts
Following are typography challenges for web designers, operating systems, and end users.
Accessibility – Web fonts should be accessible, visible, and functional for most people, especially for aged and low vision persons
Internationalization – Web fonts should support most if not all languages and scripts of the world – take example of Noto font style family which supports more than 1000 languages and 150 scripts.
Performance – Web fonts should not impact speed of page loading
Privacy, and security – Web fonts should not compromise security of users as well as other systems. Privacy and security may not be such important for web designers, but it is most important in perspective of operating systems and end users. Hackers may use per profile cache files – including font files to track activity of users. Operating systems are devising technologies in this end such as cache partitioning.
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