Operation Audacious Phoenix

While we can put in a LOT of fonts through BBCode, there's a lot of reasons why BBCode breaks font tags due to one thing or another and makes it so you have to put the font code in multiple times within a few paragraphs depending on any aesthetic changes like indents, columns, font size changes and more.

Would it be possible for non-epic members who are creating groups or templates to get a couple more simple google fonts for the body fonts?

For example: RPR uses Cambria for pretty much everything, you even see all of your preview for your work you're making IN CAMRBIA. I would LOVE for this to be an available font for users profiles and groups for non-epic members. It's already the default font on RPR, why can't it be an option within groups that non-epic members are creating?

Edit: Just for extra clarification, when you use a basic font or go with the "blank" or "unselected" option for group information the default font it forces your work into is Times New Roman which is my least favourite font.

Cambria is such a nice serif font, I support this too!

Also I find it odd that RPR's default font seems to be 'broken' for iOS/possibly Mac users, everything is in Arial. I'm sure this isn't supposed to be the case? I've had to get around it by using Georgia which is more web safe.

Nope, it's totally supposed to work that way.


Cambria is not available as a choice when creating a group template because it is a proprietary font that some computers have installed and others do not. That means we can not load it up the way we do google fonts; it gets displayed for people who already have this font on their computer.

If you do not have this font (most mac users won't, as Cambria was originally created for Microsoft machines) then we use a fallback font. If you don't have Cambria, we use arial. If you don't have arial, we use helvetica.

Why can't we buy a license and load it up for everyone? We probably could, but this was a very deliberate decision meant to keep the main site as light-weight as possible for people loading it; we make you download only one new font in order to view the site "as intended," (the heavy calligraphic style used for titles) and then use commonly available fonts for everything else. This means that some people will see the site differently from others, or even see it differently across different devices that they own. When weighing uniformity over speed of loading and gentleness on lower power devices like phones, I picked speed and compatibility. You'll note that many of the official character templates operate on this same principle, using only one "fancy" downloaded font for titles and then a series of common fallback fonts for the body; again, this is aimed at trying to make the site snappy to download and widely compatible with many devices.

But in the group font choice dropdown, when you pick a specific font, you pretty much expect that that is definitely the font everyone will see when they load. Therefore, I do not include Cambria, because I can't make that promise with as much certainty as I can with the others already there.

That is understandable! I will take the 'hit' and put the BBCode for cambria in manually then. Neat to learn how it all works though, thanks, Kim!

I'm aware it's proprietary but I thought it was unusual to have Arial as the back up font since it's quite out of place with how handwritten the site usual feels on Windows (and the lovely parchment theme). Georgia is available on both Mac and Windows, as far as I know it's meant to be one of those 'common' fonts and one that looks very similar to Camria, so would you ever consider using that as the fall back over Arial?

I had ended up with Arial because so many people told me they loved it and loved reading it back in the day that we originally did that design, and I wasn't that wedded to consistency in that area. I'm happy to put Georgia in before it though and see what happens.

I know this topic was marked as closed, but I want to re-open it with another addition to my suggestion.

If cambria is the standard font for microsoft users to automatically see, but for mac/ios users it falls to another font... why can't we have the option to pic a primary font that may not be available to ALL users, and then pick a BACK UP font that's more universally available?

My feeling is that knowing why you have to pick a back-up font requires a mini lesson on how fonts interact with browsers and some of the basics of CSS; this is more complexity than most people want or will appreciate in the already very complicated groups menu.

The other reason is that the fonts currently in the dropdown don't really need backups; if we were to add a couple that did, the backup would still be unnecessarily added complexity for nearly every font that someone might choose.

Specifying a list of fonts and backup fonts is really what custom CSS is for.