Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
fontcdn.toolforge.org
fontcdn.toolforge.org
It's no more difficult than serving any other asset. And if you're worried about privacy, then serving files locally removes any dependency on a third-party server at all (or two in this case).
Hosting assets like fonts or javascript on the same host is not only better for privacy, it's also more secure (no thirdparty can mess with your content) and contrary to popular belief also faster in a modern web environment.
What percentage of the data transferred is a font or JavaScript library?
If it's like 30% (I don't know, just guessing) then that's a portion of bandwidth that could have been used to serve users the site content.
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.
And because caches are no longer shared (unfortunately), I've started subsetting fonts myself to trim them down when possible.
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.
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)))
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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?
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)
My guess is someone added this tool for other tools to use. There's no way this is being used on the production wikis.
That's precisely what it's for; and there's a cdnjs mirror as well, for the same reason.
The tool SkyFonts (from Monotype foundry and recommended by stores like MyFonts.com) as one of several features as a "cloud font updater" includes a "download the top X Google Fonts" option. It's an easy way to get a faster page load experience on the web.
The problem to watch out for, and it is why it's not generally recommended, is that font loading times are already in the wild a privacy issue (there are fingerprinting tools out there that try to download fonts and draw them in an off-screen CANVAS, using "too fast" as a deanonymization vector).
The best bet to generally help the web at large would be a browser or OS vendor to start installing the Top X fonts from Google Fonts out of the box.
where can I find the wiki CDN network map?
I'm wondering a bit about your new zealand redirect, as there is no colocation site in new zealand on that map at least.
Even if those were somehow the 7 "best" fonts in all of the world, there's still a need to support external fonts because fonts are a tool for creative expression. Creative expression might not always be what you want from the web, but as a 90s Web fan, a web without creative expression would be a terrible web.
Though many distros still make them available for those that want them. For instance, in Ubuntu they are included in the "Restricted Extras" meta-package, or specifically in the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package.
Maybe, but using google fonts is as uncreative as you can get.
Google Fonts has problems like privacy concerns definitely, but it seems to facilitate a lot of creativity in web page design that otherwise would seem impossible. (Self-hosting fonts is not fun, and that's assuming you are capable of handling the complex slalom of font licenses, web-capable font licenses, font to webfont conversion tools, etc. There are more options beyond Google Fonts, including for commercial fonts, but Google Fonts is still the most accessible for the wild, free/open source creative parts of the web on low or no budget, the parts most like the 90s web.)