I've just noticed the various css variations also reference different fonts so it might also apply to not only lato and flatly.min.css in case of using a different variation. In our case and from there the screenshot is we didn't select any variation in the "Variations" dropdown list of "Survey options for theme bootswatch" (basically because none them is without issues in regards to readability and colors but that's another thing not relevant or related to this bug report).

@tigurr, can I ask you to test the changes in here?
https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/pull/3543/

If good, we will go ahead and apply them to the rest of the variations.

Thanks

@gabrieljenik flatly.min.css from https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/pull/3543/ appears to work fine for me, though I had to also clean tmp/assets/ after replacing the file for limesurvey to pick up the changes.

We noticed source-sans-pro.css is also served from cloud while it could be served locally. Can you confirm? Thanks

@gabrieljenik well of course, like I stated in comment https://bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=19081#c76982 above, there are plenty of other fonts referenced from google in the various css variations. Maybe that's on purpose but it would be nice to just have a font selection on the bootswatch theme itself like in fruity instead of the various css variants shipping their own fonts hardcoded.

Roboto: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/cyborg.min.css
Roboto: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/sandstone.min.css
New Cycle: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/journal.min.css
Source Sans: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/lumen.min.css
Open Sans: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/simplex.min.css
Open Sans: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/spacelab.min.css
Open Sans: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/yeti.min.css
Ubuntu: https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/united.min.css

After going deeper into this found the following:

Local Fonts

Some themes already support local fonts, like Fruity.

Fonts are published as packages and they can be configured using the config/fonts.php
Thats when the tmp/assets/xxx/font.css is created.

Then, the options.js (or similar) from the theme manages to turn the font selection into a parameter in the packages_to_load option.
That's when the font.css is imported (Actually linked to the webpage as a header).

Bootswatch

Bootswatch doesn't have the same mechanism.
Still, in the past some local font was configured there as well.
18422
https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/pull/2689
Unluckily, this change was probbaly lost when merging v6 into master.

It used the same approach as we did on this PR: On the CSS do /@import url(../../../../../assets/fonts/lato.css)

Denis did a good question: What happens when asset manager is not being used?
It works, but why?

So we dig a little bit.
Answer is it works just by luck :)
When using the asset manager, the published CSS is in a structre with similar depth as when the asset manager is not used.
Then the import doens't fail.

http://localhost:8000/limesurvey/themes/survey/bootswatch/css/variations/cosmos.min.css
http://localhost:8000/limesurvey/tmp      /assets/d5dd6f4d  /css/variations/cosmos.min.css

Conclusions

Could we use in Bootswatch the system ued fro fruity?
Maybe.

Does it worth it?
Not sure. I believe not.

I would rather patch all files from bootswatch as it was on 18422, which was already the way to go.
Maybe re apply it as well.

Lookforward to your comments.

I second your opinion, everything else would probably be something for possible future developement/improvements and is out of scope for just fixing this issue for now, however I'm just a reporter and not involved in developement whatsoever.

I don't want to hijack this thread at all but just a simple question regarding the future and defaults in general as fruity was mentioned. Is fruity still considered the standard / best supported theme, somehow I got under the maybe false impression bootswatch might actually replace it as the default/standard theme in the (near) future(?). Thanks in advance for any claraification on this subject so I know where we possibly may invest time in adapting the theme for our needs to not have to start all over any time soon.

I think it is fine to keep the current implementation for bootswatch, however i would at some point prefer to add compiling steps to it as well to prevent us from having to edit minified files.
The fonts should be loaded through packages which are dependend on what i select in the themes font options, currently this doesn't seem to work correctly and no font at all is additionally loaded from the local font files.
Regarding which theme will be the main theme, that is currently "Fruity TwentyThree" > "fruity" and bootswatch/vanilla as alternatives.

I would open a separate ticket as to assses if 18422 needs to be reaplied or not.
(Or reopen it)

Already test it : OK for core theme.

@tigurr if you wish to help by testing a bit more would be great!

Thanks

The fonts should be loaded through packages which are dependend on what i select in the themes font options

Its' variation here , need to set variation in package ?

Else : good idea.

@gabrieljenik there are some code checks that are failing https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/actions/runs/6668816209?pr=3543

Will merge master on top of it

Green

Tested and merged.

Fix committed to master branch: http://bugs.limesurvey.org/plugin.php?page=Source/view&id=35738

Fixed in Release 6.3.5+231113