Offline Font Fallback to Avoid Missing Layers

[riastrad]

Possibly a duplicate of #7862, but it feels unique enough that I'm opening up a new issue to address it. A user posted to the Android Plugins repo last week complaining that layers where not being applied at runtime when a map didn't have an internet connect: mapbox/mapbox-plugins-android#970

tl;dr the root cause was the fact that the plugin was initializing a SymbolLayer with a text field and this layer was referencing a font family that was not available offline.

I would assert that runtime styling is expected to work offline, and having a runtime layer not populate when offline does not match developer expectations. Adding some sort of fallback for these situations to ensure that the layer is rendered despite the preferred font being unavailable would be a good feature to add.

cc/ @tobrun

[stale]

This issue has been automatically detected as stale because it has not had recent activity and will be archived. Thank you for your contributions.

[hrach]

Please reopen, this is still an issue.

[386sx]

Is this issue followed up?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically detected as stale because it has not had recent activity and will be archived. Thank you for your contributions.