At this point, my question is whether we should continue with this granular approach to fonts at all. Historical note: we came up with it because there was no way to tell Mapnik "just use system fonts" - you had to specify the fonts directory in .mss. Our current solution, specifying a relative path to another Node package, allowed us to use the style both in Mapbox Studio Classic and Kartogrpaher without changing the path locally. However, it's getting clumsy as we're adding more and more fonts to it. As some point, it totally makes sense to just boil the ocean and include all the Noto fonts. @Pnorman, is there still no way to tell Mapnik to just use system fonts?

Historical note: we came up with it because there was no way to tell Mapnik "just use system fonts" - you had to specify the fonts directory in .mss. Our current solution, specifying a relative path to another Node package, allowed us to use the style both in Mapbox Studio Classic and Kartogrpaher without changing the path locally. However, it's getting clumsy as we're adding more and more fonts to it. As some point, it totally makes sense to just boil the ocean and include all the Noto fonts. @Pnorman, is there still no way to tell Mapnik to just use system fonts?

It's always been possible to use system fonts, and that's what the new style will be doing.

This is now in production: https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=arc#7/38.919/-100.402