Thread:Talk:Universal Language Selector/Design considerations regarding usage of Autonym font in ULS/reply

No. This font is clerly NOT designed to support all glyphs needed to render any supported language. For example it MUST NOT be used to display translations. Its purpose is to display only the native language names, exactly those returned by, and only those texts! Its purpose is to allow correct visual identification of languages.

In addition it must be able to render any language code, i.e. lowercase letters a-z, digits 0-9 and the minus-hyphen '-' (needed for language variants) It may render the uppercase letters, allowed as equivalents for language-codes in BCP47 for use in the lang="" attribute, or any language code supported by Mediawiki on Wikimedia sites, though Wikimedia sites should only use lowercase letters for these codes). For this reason it will include the full printable ASCII range (U+0020..U+007E, i.e. 95 glyphs only); it should probably not include punctuations of ISO88-59-1 or windows-1252 outside ASCII.

The number of needed glyphs is then capped, and is not very large (limited to the list of supported languages).

But if we remove the ASCII characters then the ".autonym" CSS class should contain "font-family: Autonym, sans-serif". But some languages will render inconstantly when some characters are found only in the "Autonym" font, others being in the browser's default fonts for "sans-serif". Their glyph metrics won't match together.

My opinion is that "sans-serif" is present in the CSS class only for the case where the browser does not load the webfont from ULS, but it should NEVER be used if the Autonym webfont is loaded: the webfont must be complete for all supported languages, even if some of them may be rendered corectly only with the browser's default "sans-serif" font list.

But I agree that all these supported glyphs should have correct metrics, and good hinting for all resolutions (including small sizes >= 8px, as low as possible).