Keep Google fonts updated on your desktop | Hacker News Reader

Keep Google fonts updated on your desktop

googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk

39 pointsrobin_reala17 comments

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What a completely terrible website.

"Would you like to install our font installer?"

No? You want to add a font to a collection to download it?

"How about installing our mac client to help with that???!!?"

....

do not want.

This is even more painful than downloading the fonts manually.

(edit: this is about 100000% more pleasant to use in every way: https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory, for anyone else looking for an easy way to get the fonts that does not involve convoluted websites)

Title is really weirdly worded, and it's not necessarily OP's fault; the article itself is poorly worded, and it shows in the confusion from the first few commenters.

Google Web Fonts have always been available offline; when you start browsing the web fonts and then add one to your "collection", you should be able to find a link that says "download your collection". That's one way to do it.

Another way to do it is by accessing the font repository on Google Code, which is not new and has always been around; the fonts are stored in a Mercurial repo. This is mentioned in a link near the end of the article.

The point of this article, and what isn't really emphasized even though it should be, is that (apparently, I haven't used it) this SkyFonts tool keeps the fonts updated on your local machine. This might seem like a silly feature, but I can tell you from experience that the Google Web Fonts do actually update pretty frequently; not just new fonts getting added, but existing fonts will also receive updates. Having to pull down the deltas on the hg repo and then reinstall all of the changed fonts manually when you're using a large subset of the library is not a trivial task.

The app keeps the fonts in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\skyfonts-google folder - that's a terrible idea, since the Temp folder might be nuked. It's meant to be for temp files, not cache.

Also the systray app does not respond correctly. And then the manual download of font? What gives... I'm totally missing what's this about (I'm not a designer, so I probably don't know much).

Or likely better for HN: get a clone of the repo of google webfonts, maintained by that team: https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/

I'm trying to find an easy way to get them all.... A quick search turned up this linux script which uses Mercurial.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/automatically-install-all-goo...

There's a link in this article that tells you how to do it on various platforms.

https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/#Download_Sour...

I put this up a while back (and need to update it): http://joemaller.com/1856/download-google-fonts/

Google changed repository layout so there are a lot more subfolders to sort through but `hg clone https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/` still works fine.

(edit: just saw @shadowmint's update, agreed about https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory being better in every way.)

Now I have enough fonts to play with that I'll never get around to writing anything in a word processor.

Somewhat off topic, but I recently found this article about Google Web Fonts (and the comments) very interesting:

http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?page_id=3207

Is there any use in this for someone that doesn't use said fonts for development? Will having them installed locally prevent websites from loading them as needed, thus speeding up browsing?

You are more then capable of serving the fonts via https with javascript. See: https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/webfont_loader

Edit: Hmm, re-reading your question that may not have been what you looking for. I would still say yes, it would serve pages faster, as it would serve pages faster due to the lack of https connection to fetch the font.

Oh dear, I hope I'm helping. :/

If websites are using the fonts correctly, yes.

However, it's not worth it for that use, and it's especially not worth it playing Pokemon (gotta catch 'em all!) with all the web fonts you see around the internet.

It is useful if you work on more than one computer and want to keep them synchronized though.

What if I don't want SkyFonts? What if I just want to download the font file? Didn't seem very clear in the article.

Add them to your collection, then hit the download arrow in the top right corner.

Thanks!

How about just bundling the fonts in a zip with a download link?

https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory/zipball/master

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