Font features not working with Inter served by Google Fonts

[cchaos]

I tested this on the Google Font site and it's not working there which is how I determined that's where the problem is.

It was originally found when trying to use the tnum feature for the values of EuiProgress:

Essentially tabular numbers makes the numbers of a font behave almost like they are a monospace font so that when they are lined up in a column, they align better. Here's a screenshot of how it's supposed to behave with Inter. As I mentioned in the meeting, however, this is not currently working with the Google font. So I'll have to explore that later.

Originally posted by @cchaos in #3948 (comment)

[timroes]

I just wanted to open an issue, but it feels this issue kind of describes this aroundish, so maybe we can just rename this issue.

I wanted to check if there's a specific reason why we're not using the variable font of Inter, but the "traditional" font? Using the variable font would save bandwidth for downloading all that different weight font files and would also allow us to use more variable font features, e.g. see what was described above. Also all browsers we support are supporting variable fonts. Also it's perfectly progressive enhancable by using the variable font just behind a media query (@supports (font-variation-settings: normal) { .. }, see also https://rsms.me/inter/#usage).

So I wanted to suggest if there are no reasons I am overseeing to use the variable font in EUI by default instead of the traditional one.

cc @chandlerprall what I've mentioned recently.

[cchaos]

The reason we have not use the variable font is because we only recently dropped support for IE (11). It's certainly something we can revisit.