[chrismorgan]

There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once.

But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so that reason has turned from a positive into a probable negative, because it’s having to look up another domain name and open a new TLS connection—though if you’re serving the resources with HTTP/1.1 it might still be faster coming from a different origin, if you’re loading enough resources.

After that, the main advantage of Google Fonts doing the CSS serving is that it varies the CSS it serves by user-agent, to give you what your browser will cope with best, whether it be EOT, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, maybe they vary the response in other ways as well, I’m not sure. In practice, I think that benefit has run its course: I recommend that people don’t even bother with the bulletproof web fonts formula for supporting all the formats, but just serve woff2: fonts are fundamentally supposed to be optional (icon fonts are generally bad), and users of such ancient browsers as IE, EdgeHTML < 14, Firefox < 39, Chrome < 36 and Safari < 10/12 don’t need the fonts anyway.

So then, I say that the only thing that remains is the neat packaging of the font files, subsetting, &c. And I say copying the files and serving them yourself is overall probably a very wise idea.

[innocenat]

There are also another advantage: font subsetting. Google Font automatically subset large fonts. This doesn't really matter for Latin, but for CJK where an entire font can be >10MB, Google Font automatically subset it into >100 files, partitioned by the general usage frequency.

I served my own fonts, but subsetting those font aren't trivial matter. Personally I just grabbed the unicode range that Google Font used and generate my own subsets, but it is not that trivial.

(The reason I served my own font is actually because some font on Google Font are not up to dated, and I actually abuse the unicode-range to use different fonts for different scripts)

[chrismorgan]

I was talking specifically of the advantages of global CDNs. Font subsetting is something Google Fonts covers and handles very well for the most common use cases, but is nothing to do with the global CDN.

[fr3dx]

> But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons

I didn't heard about this thing until today, are you sure that it is already implemented in all major browsers? I have found this source [1] but for what I can tell, at the moment this feature is behind a flag in chromium and firefox (maybe it is already implemented in Safari).

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away

[dna_polymerase]

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536058

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110269

[chrismorgan]

You are correct and I was wrong; I had thought it had been shipped, but it shipped behind a flag.

[dvcrn]

Oh wow I wasn’t aware that cross site caching isn’t a thing anymore. That’s how I learned it years ago from the jquery days

[SquareWheel]

Good comment. That elaborates on the reasons I chose for self-hosting fonts.

And because caches are no longer shared (unfortunately), I've started subsetting fonts myself to trim them down when possible.

[social_quotient]

How much time do you spend on this roughly? Also do you do it for icon fontS like don’t awesome? Thx!

[SquareWheel]

Most of the time investment was setting up the prerequisites for the various tools. Notable requirements were python, node+npm, Microsoft Build Tools, and Google's Brotli.

I used glyphhanger[1] to apply the actual subsetting. Use the --spider flag to find a list of unicode ranges used on your site. Then you can generate files with something like:

glyphhanger --whitelist="U+20,U+21,U+26-29,U+2C-3B,U+3F-57,U+59,U+61-7A,U+2013,U+2019,U+201C,U+201D,U+2026" --subset=SourceSansPro-Regular.ttf --formats=woff2,woff --css

Then you would add that same unicode-range to your CSS.

I haven't tried this on icon fonts. I tend towards SVGs instead.

[1] https://github.com/filamentgroup/glyphhanger

[chrismorgan]

I do really simple subsetting on my site: rather than trying to figure out which characters are used in which fonts, I just dump all of the site’s contents, and sort out all the characters in it.

A very slightly simplified version of my Makefile, which depends on the original font files found in $(PATH_TO_FONTS):

  .font-subset: $(call rwildcard,,%.html %.md)
   find . -name *.md -or -name *.html -exec cat {} + | grep -o . | sort | uniq | tr -d '\n' > .font-subset

  define FONT =
  static/$(1).woff2: .font-subset
   pyftsubset "$(PATH_TO_FONTS)/$(2)/OpenType/$(3).otf" --text-file=.font-subset --output-file=static/$(1).woff2 $(4) --flavor=woff2

  fonts: static/$(1).woff2
  endef

  $(eval $(call FONT,eta,Equity,Equity Text A Regular))
  $(eval $(call FONT,etab,Equity,Equity Text A Bold))
  $(eval $(call FONT,etabi,Equity,Equity Text A Bold Italic))
  $(eval $(call FONT,etai,Equity,Equity Text A Italic))

  TRIPLICATE_FONT_FEATURES := --layout-features+=ss01,ss02
  $(eval $(call FONT,tt4,Triplicate,Triplicate T4 Regular,$(TRIPLICATE_FONT_FEATURES)))
  $(eval $(call FONT,tt4i,Triplicate,Triplicate T4 Italic,$(TRIPLICATE_FONT_FEATURES)))
  $(eval $(call FONT,tt7,Triplicate,Triplicate T4 Bold,$(TRIPLICATE_FONT_FEATURES)))
  $(eval $(call FONT,tt7i,Triplicate,Triplicate T4 Bold Italic,$(TRIPLICATE_FONT_FEATURES)))

And with that, `make fonts` generates a new version of the fonts, trimming out all the unnecessary glyphs and features, while retaining ss01 and ss02 for Triplicate. On Arch Linux, this depends on the python-fonttools package for pyftsubset, and the python-brotli package for --flavor=woff2.

It would be possible to do much better: to identify which characters are rendered in which fonts, which sequences of characters are employed (so that you can trim kerning and ligature tables), things like that; but this does a good enough job for me. (We’re talking about differences of probably less than half a kilobyte in a <20KB file.) I use only English text on my site and I control all the content, so I don’t need to worry about unicode-range splitting.

Concerning icon fonts: this technique would work for it, but for myself I refuse to use icon fonts because they’re fundamentally moderately bad: you can’t trust fonts to load at least in part because quite a few users simply have them disabled for performance or accessibility. There do exist icon fonts that have an almost tolerable fallback, where they use ligatures so that the sequence of letters “envelope” becomes an envelope, “twitter” becomes a Twitter logo, &c. so that screen readers will read the name of the icon without you needing to worry about aria-label and other related properties, but the icon name is normally not the text you should have there, so it’s kind of a waste after all that. Your options are better with something like inline SVG icons or the the inline SVG sprite technique. (See https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ for an example.) Also avoid using just icons with no labels, humans perform enormously better when there are labels on their buttons.

[atonse]

Picking the font based on the browser – surely there's an open source plugin for NGINX or something that could replicate this?

This is a perfect sort of thing as a Caddy plugin too. Or a CDN provider to provide this out of the box.

The CloudFlare people could do this in a weekend probably and I'd happily sign up because I'm less concerned about my privacy with CF than with Google.

But is this even an issue? If you declare the 4 different formats, won't the browser know to request the best one automatically?

[chrismorgan]

Sure, it’s called the bulletproof @font-face syntax. But that means you’ve got to get the fonts in all of the formats, for starters. I don’t think it’s worth it at all, for the stated reason. Three years ago maybe, but definitely not now.

[jcahill]

The other advantage of a font CDN is updating.

[chrismorgan]

I don’t know if Google Fonts has changed its policies, but historically it pretty much just hasn’t updated its fonts. Even when repeatedly asked to by the original font’s author. Take as an example Crimson from https://github.com/skosch/Crimson: Google took Crimson Text in 2010 and put it onto Google Fonts, but mangled it in the process, messing up its line-height badly so that the regular and bold weights didn’t match, and that text using the web font would not line up with text using the original font. In 2012, the upstream font made various improvements, and the author attempted upon multiple occasions then and since to get Google Fonts to update the font (or even just to fix the bugs they introduced, for starters!). Others also tried. Well, it’s still broken. In the end a new version of the font (with variable weight) was commissioned in 2018, and Crimson Pro now is. Allegedly the problems in Crimson Text were supposed to be fixed up after Crimson Pro was released: https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2395#issuecomment-631....

I am aware of them updating fonts that they commissioned. But I know of multiple cases where Google Fonts has been serving versions of fonts that are five or more years out of date, sometimes even broken by Google Fonts. Crimson Text I can kinda understand them not fixing completely, because fixing it would have changed character positioning (thus breaking people’s careful alignment to work around the Google-Fonts-introduced bugs). But there have been other cases where that didn’t apply: metrics were the same, but they just wouldn’t update the font. Might have been PT Serif? Lato? I can’t remember, it’s years since I last cared about Google Fonts.

In short: updating the fonts is not all it’s cracked up to be; Google mostly just doesn’t, and half the time you actually wouldn’t want the font updates anyway—depends on the nature of the update.

[jcahill]

Updating is mostly relevant for unicode completionist families and emoji.

[WorldMaker]

Like all art, fonts are rarely completed and merely published. Hinting especially seems like a fine art that is never done, there's always more things to hint, and more hints to tweak towards perfection of the typographic art.

Some of my favorite fonts have regular releases. As with most art, software enables a more regular release cadence than past such systems. (Such as the days when font foundry was literal and fonts were published to metal and distributed in giant physical cases.)

[pbhjpbhj]

Another issue is copyright, which for typefaces and fonts varies considerably by jurisdiction - using Google seems to offload liability as long as you use it within their terms then they should at least be the leading co-party if a rights owner sued.

[lucideer]

> seems to

Do you have a source for this? IANAL but if a Google font was disallowed for a jurisdiction, Google would be in legal trouble for advertising/hosting it on their own site, but that would be a separate case. I seriously doubt they'd share any of the liability for you using it on your site.

[pbhjpbhj]

No source, just a feel for it as I've studied quite a few copyright cases.

I guess it's like me having an embedded video except that for the fonts Google have uploaded the media, not the public. If I watch a video on YouTube that was a copyright infringing upload, strictly (in my jurisdiction), I would have also committed infringement. But the courts are exceedingly unlikely to punish me, especially if the uploader warranted the video for my use.

Google say the fonts they have are free-libre for website use: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq.

That's an implied warranty, I should do due diligence, but if they have doubts they should temper what they say too (they probably attempt to disclaim the implied warranty in their Terms). If they're offering fonts that are not "open source" they are in the wrong; I might also be wrong but I should - when using the fonts as they direct - be able to sue them in turn if I'm sued for using the fonts they offer.

It's not joint liability, but in general the law accounts for people being deceived. It's not negligent infringement on my part, IMO, as I checked the Google info for the license terms and have no reason to suspect they're wrong.

If the BBC put on a tv show they don't have copyright permission to air, and I suggest in my magazine article that you watch the show, I've directed you towards infringing material - which may be contributory infringement (in UK) - but the BBC would be the principle offender. If the BBC make statements saying the work is free-libre, and I rely on that then to me they appear severally liable, and liable for deceiving me.