How to Self-Host a Web Font From Google Fonts

Not doing it is also nicer for people with slow/unreliable network access, where they can block fonts, or even if they don't block them, can access your page more quickly and have a render without the custom font.

https://dev.to/rstacruz/public-cdns-arent-useful-anymore-2b6...

Wait a moment, why should this be Google's job? They're not the lords of your HTML and CSS. In fact, they have no duty to help you with anything at all, and neither does anybody else except your mother.

I do have a minor constructive criticism, as someone that does not use Apple, I found the '+' to actually select a Google Font to be far from intuitive. I was looking for a big button in the bottom right with 'Select' (or some other label).

Other than that, bookmarked, kettle on and fired up to get my fonts optimised. Thank you.

Completely different use case, where it assumes you have the font downloaded already, and every new regen of your static site you regenerate the font for what’s required to render it.

I just checked and jsdelivr has had like 300 billion requests past month and over 16,813 TB

Really fascinating stuff. I will try to use this from now on! (earlier I was thinking of using something like coollabs.io but I checked its code and I see that the fonts are served through something like bunnycdn from coollabs side which is cool but still)

Honestly, what other things would be better off packaged as npm packages as I never thought that packaging fonts as npm package should make so much sense but here we are!

Bookmarked!!

I've had to do this several times in the past because the customer firewall blocks google domains, and it never required a second thought. The only question I had was around the legality of doing so (which I checked on). Once I verified that, it was about 2 minutes of wget (or curl) the file down, stick in a static web server, and update the links in the HTML page and Bob's your Uncle

It might be because it's a "You should host web fonts from Google Fonts yourself" in disguise. The technical "How to" is almost not the important part here :-)

It may give some pause to web devs who hotlink to google here on HN without much thoughts and make them consider doing it differently next time.

I suspect many people upvoting it are doing it for this. Maybe upvotes here might actually mean "Please host Google Fonts yourself".

Writing a tool to do all that work for you is the hacker spirit. Mocking the work is not.

So things got to become common sense for us because it was easy to get overwhelmed in information on why it should be common sense. The web has changed dramatically - there is a lot of content in Discord servers and it’s rare for frequently asked Discord questions to turn into web content. Common sense isn’t as wide ranging, but that’s been replaced by extreme specialty knowledge.

I see this a lot in software companies when build tools crap out. Younger developers have much more specialized knowledge on the build tools and can outwork me when everything is on the happy path. Off the happy path, all the general bits and pieces we picked up through osmosis back in the day become very helpful.

I’m glad that articles like this are being promoted. This plumbing type knowledge will be useful many many times over the course of a career. Not everything has to be aimed at me to be good, you know?

As the website I was optimizing was selfhosted, also selfhosting the font had a noticeable effect on the page load time. See https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield/commit/12352667c01624...

I'm not sure what you mean with the rest of the comment though, it's a very small change and it gets cached by the browser like other static assets, so I'm not sure what is the overkill here.

With built in fonts, if you want to support a wide range of machines, you have seven reliable fonts, one monospace and one cursive font to choose from. Georgia is a good looking serif font and I use it too much now, but the sans serif pairings aren’t great.

With CSS, you can make arial work as a heading font with a Georgia body for example, but that takes time and creates a testing burden. It only takes seconds to host a font that looks great out of the box and imposes a smaller testing burden. So for me the answer is a lack of talent that I’ve mitigated through transferring fonts on requests. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but my designs are no longer covered by a Geneva convention so that makes me feel better. :)

I really love this line:

> For clarity, Google does not use any information collected by Google Fonts to create profiles of end users or for targeted advertising.

Except they already have a profile of you, I promise. For instance, they explicitly don't say they don't use information from google fonts requests to update their existing profiles of you.

I think that

> Google does not use any information collected by Google Fonts to create profiles of end users or for targeted advertising.

should be read as:

> Google does not CURRENTLY use any information collected by Google Fonts to create profiles of end users or for targeted advertising.

Also note that the text as-is says nothing about updating existing profiles, just that new ones won't be created from this data.

> Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled, redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license.