[tor-bugs] #20842 [User Experience]: Proposal: Improve Tor Browser font whitelist / bundled fonts

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#20842: Proposal: Improve Tor Browser font whitelist / bundled fonts
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     Reporter:  arthuredelstein  |      Owner:
         Type:  defect           |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium           |  Milestone:
    Component:  User Experience  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal           |   Keywords:  tbb-usability
Actual Points:                   |  Parent ID:
       Points:                   |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                   |
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 '''Background:'''

 In #13313 we introduced a new font whitelisting mechanism. Tor Browser
 only allows certain fonts to be used in the browser, in order to prevent
 bad people from trying to identify you by detecting what fonts are
 installed on your computer. Font whitelisting is also available in
 Firefox, off by default. (The whitelisting is controlled by a pref,
 "font.system.whitelist", which contains a comma-separated list of allowed
 font names. You can edit this pref by opening a tab and browsing to
 `about:config`.)

 On Window and Mac, we mostly whitelist certain system fonts that are
 bundled with the operating system by default. We bundle a few
 [https://www.google.com/get/noto/ Google Noto fonts] as well for languages
 that don't have a built-in platform font.

 On Linux, we bundle a large number of Google Noto fonts, plus Arimo,
 Cousine, and Tinos. We don't expose any system fonts, because these aren't
 consistent across Linux flavors.

 My strategy for choosing fonts for the whitelist was to try to cover all
 possible languages with at least one font, and get the work done as
 efficiently as possible. I whitelisted Mac and Windows fonts that have
 been available for a long time and should be on essentially all systems.
 Bundling fonts from the Noto collection was a quick and dirty method for
 covering any missing fonts for different languages.

 But there are probably more appealing fonts for some languages that we
 could use, especially on Linux. For example, in #20820 we are considering
 switching Linux from Noto Japanese to mona.ttf because the latter looks
 better (according to Yawning) and because mona.ttf can be used in the
 ancient Japanese art of ascii calligraphy. I also heard from someone who
 knows that the Tamil font on Windows is not too beautiful.

 '''Proposed project:'''

 So it would be a useful project to go through each of the fonts on each
 platform and see if there are better fonts that could be used instead.
 Important considerations would include:
 * Aesthetics
 * Character coverage
 * Printability
 * Font licensing
 * Font file size

 This would require asking the opinions of native speakers of various
 languages.

 Ideally, we could come up with a new font whitelist and bundling list for
 Mac, Windows and Linux, where the fonts are beautiful and users are happy.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20842>
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