[Tools-discuss] Re: xml2rfc: boldface in Noto Sans

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

I'm not seeing a problem here.  But that is not because there is no problem.

The bold text is a little bit hard to make out, but only because two digits next to each other with different bolding is subtle in any of the four presentations I checked.  That's because I (apparently) have the fonts cached on the relevant domains.  Carsten doesn't.

The problem is that https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Sans only returns weight 400 fonts.  Bold uses weight 700.  It probably changed recently on Google's end.

This is a bug on xml2rfc that should be easy enough to fix.  While at it, it would be good if the fonts were moved to be hosted on ietf.org or rfc-editor.org, rather than requiring a separate connection.  These are somewhat chunky fonts, but the added cost, especially with strong caching, is probably modest enough.

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025, at 17:58, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> I was trying to make some point more apparent by using <strong> markup.
>
> It turns out that <strong> markup is nearly invisible in the 
> xml2rfc-generated HTML:
>
> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-core-yang-sid-pen-01.html#name-example
>
> (New game: Find the boldface :-) 
>
> This is fine in plaintext (where we have “*” fallback) and in PDF 
> (which uses Noto-serif), please see Section 2 of:
>
> https://tzi.org/~cabo/draft-ietf-core-yang-sid-pen.pdf
>
> (This is the same document — I have to generate the PDF separately 
> because the I-D submission interface still doesn’t.)
>
> Note that the variant, somewhat harder to read formatting shown by the 
> i-d-template CI also can show boldface:
>
> https://core-wg.github.io/sid-pen/draft-ietf-core-yang-sid-pen.html#name-example
>
> Is this something that should be fixed?
> Or does the RFC editor maybe use CSS different from that used by plain xml2rfc?
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
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