Hacker News Reader

Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

It's not a single file with a simple line of CSS like in the old days. It's a bunch of files, so you need to make sure you do have all the files and understand how exactly these come together.

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.

I must say, this is a little bit like complaining that Google supplied a PNG when you wanted a JPG. Like, the original file is the TTF/OTF, that's the raw material and what you would use in an OS or an application. And it works fine in CSS as well. Just convert it to a WOFF2 if you really want to, it's not hard.

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

Any idea if the woff2 files served by Google are the same? Or that they maybe are more optimized for web?

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.

Why do you need the woff file? Fonts work fine with TTF

Reply on news.ycombinator.com