Additional Plex capabilities

[mattrosno]

Summary

Currently, we offer support for a handful of font faces (sans, mono, serif, condensed) and a handful of weights (light, normal, semibold). We also offer a way for these fonts to be loaded easily through Google Fonts by default. However, this was never intended for production environments. It has issues staying up to date, internationalization limitations, performance concerns, and fails to utilize new Plex features such as the variable font.

Job stories

1. When building an interface, I want to easily incorporate Plex in the languages and weights my product requires.
2. When building an interface I want the loading web fonts to impact my performance metrics as little as possible without substantial configuration.

Success measures

1. Provide API through Plex to permit modular builds based on application requirements (weights, languages, font-face features)
2. Provide a solid default in Carbon similar to what we have now that works for most use-cases
3. Provide a solid ramp for adding additional languages for internationalization
4. Use fonts directly from @ibm/plex instead of having any checked into our packages
5. Add infrastructure for versioned font sources for cache control
6. Investigate and report on feasibility of a Plex CDN hosted on IBM Cloud

Sponsoring team

Carbon team

[mattrosno]

Epics:

• IBM Plex Integration carbon#8710
• Plex 7.0 (next) IBM/plex#370