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Fix Fonts
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Description

See discussion in D25021, T15049.

  • User complained about system website being broken when local system had Segoe UI Symbol but not Segoe UI installed.
  • We tried to improve things by adding system-ui font in default css
  • This solved this user's particular problem, but caused other users to have crappy experience because their system-ui font is bad.

We should probably just revert D25021, and either find some web-font that looks like Segoe for any user that isn't on Windows.

Event Timeline

avivey triaged this task as High priority.Thu, Aug 31, 08:22
avivey created this task.

Did some digging, and it looks like Segoe is not something we can use:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq#redistribution-and-extended-rights

No, as Segoe UI is both our user interface and corporate branding font, it is not available for use outside of Microsoft products on non-Windows platforms. However, we do have a Segoe-compatible open-source font you can use: Selawik.

I did find in on CDNFonts, but that looks like it's missing most weights - and I think we would still not be allowed to bundle/refer to it.

It's also a little bit common to install it on Linux systems - I found plenty of instructions for that, so 🤷‍♀️.

Anyway, MS do offer a "Segoe-compatible open-source font" - Selawik, which was released in 2015 and never updated again, and I understand we can use that one as a webfont or package it ourselves, and then use it as a fallback for Segoe UI.