type: fall back to a monospace face, not Arial - #46
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The body face is the monospace - that is the editorial choice the design system describes - but the fallback chain was Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. Two consequences. If the webfont ever failed to load, the whole site rendered in a proportional face. And glyph by glyph: next/font subsets Space Mono to latin, latin-ext and vietnamese, so any character outside those ranges was drawn by the first fallback that had it. Chrome reports the arrow in a back link as Arial (1 glyph) beside Space Mono (31) - a proportional arrow inside monospace text, in the header's Contact button, every back link, the play triangles and the close crosses. That is the same root cause as the nav caret, which was fixed one glyph at a time. Naming a monospace fallback fixes all of them at once: the same probe now reports Cascadia Mono for the arrow. Body copy and headings are untouched. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
Picks up the monospace fallback. next/font renames its generated font assets when the fallback metrics change, so 12 woff2 files are replaced; all 833 font references resolve. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
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What
Closes the rest of UPD-017 — the symbols that share a root cause with the nav caret fixed in #45 — but without touching 139 call sites.
The body face is the monospace; that is the editorial choice
docs/DESIGN-SYSTEM.mddescribes. The fallback chain wasArial, Helvetica, sans-serif. That had two consequences.If the webfont ever failed to load, the whole site rendered in a proportional face. The design would have silently collapsed.
And glyph by glyph.
next/fontsubsets Space Mono to latin, latin-ext and vietnamese, so any character outside those ranges is drawn by the first fallback that has it. Chrome'sCSS.getPlatformFontsForNodeon a back link reported:A proportional arrow sitting inside monospace text — in the header's
Contact →, every← Publicationsback link, the▶play triangles, the✕close buttons, and ~139 places in total.Naming a monospace fallback fixes all of them in one change. The same probe now reports
Cascadia Monofor the arrow.Why not convert them to SVG
That was the original plan for UPD-017, and it was wrong. It would have meant 139 edits across 43 files, an enormous diff, and it is not even possible for the glyphs that live inside content strings in
src/content/. The fallback chain is where the defect actually was.Verified
CSS.getPlatformFontsForNodebefore and after:Arial→Cascadia Monofor the arrow glyph.Space Mono, headings still toBebas Neue— only the previously-Arial glyphs changed.Reviewer note
This changes how those ~139 glyphs look — the arrows are now monospace-width rather than Arial's longer form. That is the point, but it is a visible change beyond the header, so it is worth a look before merge.
ui-monospaceleads the stack, so each platform uses its own UI monospace (SF Mono, Cascadia, DejaVu Sans Mono) rather than one specific font. Still platform-dependent, but always monospace now, which is the design intent.next/fontrenames its generated font assets when the fallback metrics change, so 12woff2files are replaced in the snapshot. That is expected, not drift.