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Comment by cramforce | Hacker News Reader

Do not use this, use Google Fonts, just self-host them. This site claims better privacy, but does so using the wrong solution since you still have to trust them.

Self host (supported by Google Fonts but not by this service): - Better privacy - Better performance (no extra DNS lookups, TLS connection)

Their default embed code is a CSS @import directive. These must never be used in production code (It's fine as a directive for the compiler for local files but not with remote URLs). Leads to FOUC and FOIT.

Also, next step in amateur hour: They serve their CSS and fonts on the same domain as their marketing website. Cookies galore.

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> Leads to FOUC and FOIT.

What are those acronyms?

Flash of Unstyled Content and Flash of Invisible Text.

* FOUC: when you see content in the wrong font, then it switches to the correct font, sometimes leading to page layout jumps.

* FOIT: when you see _no_ text content because the desired font is missing with no fallbacks/the CSS directed not to use fallbacks. Once the font loads, page layout might jump.

Here the definition is actually broader than FOUC just for the font part. It can cause rendering without any CSS

Flash of Unstyled Content, and Flash of Ice Tea

> Better performance

Counterbalanced by the fact that if you just throw any old random font file on your server, it'll quite possibly be larger (in some cases considerably so) than necessary. So now you need to subset/split up the font files yourself, which takes some extra work (and the various online subsetting tools I've found often don't allow proper control over which OpenType typographic features to keep, sometimes mangle ligatures, etc., so I had to hack something together myself based on the Python fontTools), especially if subsetting a single file isn't enough and you actually need to split the fonts into multiple files.

It's super trivial to outsource the sub setting to Google Fonts. Just request their CSS and curl the font files referenced in it. If that is too tedious, build a small proxy.

Fair enough, if you only want to avoid Google for the hosting you could just copy their fonts and be done with it, yes.

(And in my case that whole effort wasn't actually so much for philosophical reasons, i.e. to try avoiding to use Google at all costs, but rather because Google Fonts was serving an outdated version of the font I was wanting to use, and was missing either some additional characters or bug fixes that were only added in a more recent version.)

Here's a great little helper to self-host google fonts: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts

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