"Bold" uses font weight not available in Noto Serif font set

[aduth]

Issue Overview

Gutenberg uses font-weight: 600 in many elements as a bolder font weight:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=font-weight%3A+600&type=

Where not explicitly assigned, like post title, headings also fall back to the font-weight: 600 default from WordPress admin styles:

https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/4.8.1/wp-admin/css/common.css#L310-L318

But the Noto Serif font pulled from Google Fonts does not include this weight:

gutenberg/lib/client-assets.php

Lines 813 to 816 in fbb2d42

	wp_enqueue_style(
	'wp-editor-font',
	'https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Serif:400,400i,700,700i'
	);

The default behavior in most browsers to handle this is to try to emulate the weight, which can have undesirable effects:

https://alistapart.com/article/say-no-to-faux-bold

We should decide one of:

• Close this issue as "wontfix", and continue to use the emulated font weight
• Use Noto Serif at font-weight: 700 for bold effects
• Use a different font family

[mjchamplin]

I think using a typeface with a larger range of weights (or at least more than two) would be a good solution. There are lots of great options on Google Fonts that have a full range of weights.

[ellatrix]

See also #2782.

[karmatosed]

I'm closing this as we have a discussion about fonts in #2782.