Re: [PATCH RFC RESEND 0/4] Documentation: Web fonts for kernel documentation

[David Vernet <void@manifault.com>]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 10:35:47AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:

Hello Bagas,

[...]

> > The solution
> > ============
> >
> > Uniform the font choices by leveraging web fonts. Most of people reading
> > the kernel docs should already have modern browser that supports this
> > feature (e.g. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox). The fonts are downloaded
> > automatically when loading the page, but only if the reader don't
> > already have ones installed locally. Subsequent docs page loading will
> > use the browser cache to retrieve the fonts. If for some reasons the
> > fonts fail to load, the browser will fall back to fallback fonts
> > commonly seen on other sites.
> 
> So my immediate response to this is pretty uniformly negative.
> 
> - If you don't like serif, tweaking conf.py is easy enough without
>   pushing it on everybody else.
> 
> - I'm not thrilled about adding a bunch of binary font data to the
>   kernel, and suspect a lot of people would not feel that the bloat is
>   worth it.
> 
> - The licensing of the fonts is not fully free.

+1 to all of Jon's points. We already have to deal with folks arguing
against .rst and pushing for us to just use plaintext for everything. I
suspect their reaction to this would be, to put it politely, even less
restrained.

Thanks,
David