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Comment by shimon_e | Hacker News Reader

I have a problem with Google web fonts. Sometimes connectivity to Google is problematic. For example in China after searching the wrong keyword all connections to Google are blocked for 1.5 minutes. This leads to sites with Google web fonts not hosted locally to hang in loading as it waits for a response from Google. This has led me to hosting web fonts locally.

Was wondering if anyone has a better solution. Or if anyone from Google is reading this, could they place web fonts on a different domain/IP and pray that global censors don't list it?

Kinda nice to be able use cached versions of the fonts.

I only use China as an example. I have had problems with Google web fonts in other country and on bad connections.

edit: watching the video it sounds like by hosting locally I am not taking advantage of the different versions served to different operating systems.

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Google and Typekit released a javascript project called web font loader[1] that allows custom fallback logic. You can add custom code that loads self-hosted fonts if Google is timing out. To generate the fonts on your server, you can download the original fonts[2] and run them through FontSquirrel's Font-Face Generator[3]. This provides some of the optimization benefits that Ilya mentions in his blog post.

[1] https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader [2] http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/ [3] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Wow thanks! I'd recommend this as default practice.

Could you not mirror the fonts from Google?

No as they need 30+ variants of the fonts to support everything right now and Google customizes them on the basis of user agent.

Hopefully in the future it will be a lot more simpler.

Thanks for pointing this out, will definitely look into it. One tip is, and it sounds like you're already using it, is to download the webfonts to your local machine, which would avoid any future downloads. (Except, that still wouldn't resolve the blocking of the dynamic CSS).

Thanks. Glad that Google developers talk their time to read comments here. :D

I'm reading your blog and wow it is very useful. Guess you are the guy to look into such issue.

BTW, the hang seems to be caused by the block of the dynamic css.

After reading your post http://www.igvita.com/2012/06/14/debunking-responsive-css-pe... It seems merely adding a media tag to the link tag would prevent webkit browsers from hanging.

The article seems to suggest that with fonts.googleapis.com, the font is served from common domain and cached for 1-year (by default). So, all sites using the same font inclusion logic may have to load from cache quickly. Am I missing anything here?

The fonts themselves are cached. The CSS is cached for 24 hours to allow them to point to a new versions of the font.

This css file stops the parser till it is loaded and when connectivity to Google is an issue it hangs the loading of sites. See http://www.igvita.com/2012/06/14/debunking-responsive-css-pe...

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