Font isn't loading on production

[reefdog]

In production, the font is trying (and failing) to load from the path https://arches-app-demo.opentechstrategies.com/assets/inter-latin-wght-normal-[signature].woff2. But other static assets are coming from https://arches-app-demo.opentechstrategies.com/static/archesdataviewer/vite_build/assets/*.

I suspect there is some build-fu — or perhaps Fontsource-configuration — that we need to do to make sure the font is correctly referenced.

[reefdog]

The fonts are being correctly built to the target directory: https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/arches-app-exp/tree/main/archesdataviewer/static/vite_build/assets

But Fontsource isn't aware of that location, I guess?

[hminsky2002]

@reefdog this has been plaguing me since we introduced the font. Because of nginx config defined here, we are serving everything from the archesdataviewer/static directory from static/archesdataviewer. For reference, navigating to https://arches-app-demo.opentechstrategies.com/static/archesdataviewer/vite_build/assets/inter-latin-wght-normal-C2S99t-D.woff2 will indeed download you the fonts. Is there any way to customize the font-source url that it seeks the font from?

[reefdog]

@hminsky2002 Oh, I missed your reply here somehow.

Is there any way to customize the font-source url that it seeks the font from?

This is what I'm hoping to find! There's not any word of that in the (sparse) documentation, but I hold out hope for that. Before we commit to the CDN route — the site's not broken without it, it just looks a bit plainer — I'm going to explore this a little more, ping the devs, etc.

[reefdog]

Okay, so: I'm going to solve this the coward's way, also known as the way I probably should have explored in the beginning: re-evaulating whether we even want a custom font at all! Behold…

Using the Inter font…

Using the system-default font stack (used by GitHub, et al)…

There are miniscule ways in which I prefer Inter, but not nearly enough to justify the trouble -- or even the additional network weight. I'm going to just remove the custom font entirely.