Comment by OskarS
Google Fonts lets you just download the font, right? So what's the problem with self-hosting them? They're not encrypted or anything. Like, I'm not sure what else you would want Google to do.
Google Fonts lets you just download the font, right? So what's the problem with self-hosting them? They're not encrypted or anything. Like, I'm not sure what else you would want Google to do.
I'm a very dedicated anti-Google person who's trying to move everything I can off of any kind of Google service, so I very much understand the desire to self-host. But I find it hard to find fault with Google here. "If you don't want to worry about hosting, here's a one-liner you can add to CSS that hosts it off our servers. If you want to do something else, here are the raw font files as a single click download, do whatever you like!". That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and it's a great service to improve typography on the web.
Google fonts download button gives you a TTF file and not a WOFF2 file so you have to read the CSS to get the WOFF2 file.
Google fonts download button gives you a TTF file and not a WOFF2 file so you have to read the CSS to get the WOFF2 file.
Or you use Google's own TTF <-> WOFF2 converter tools: https://github.com/google/woff2 [0]
I have very recent -- like, 2 weeks ago -- successful experience of using these, since I wanted to distribute a WOFF2 as part of a browser extension.
[0] edited to add - you don't have to build it, you can get it from homebrew https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/woff2 or an Arch package https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/woff2/ and presumably other distros
I’m afraid I don’t know for sure, I only know that the woff2 file I generated with the CLI worked fine in all the browsers I needed it to. Other posters have said that Google may do some user-agent sniffing or other fingerprinting to maybe serve an even more reliable version, but I can’t comment on that.
It’s like we’ve taken a step back and people forgot how the web used to be built. I’ve also seen someone ask how you use JavaScript if you don’t have a preprocessor like webpack.