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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source):

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts

> You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server.

Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move that along.

Update: No cookies are set by Google either, they're just doing analytics by the user agent sent. The actual font files have 1 year expires headers on them as well, so cookies would be of limited use.

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Also, without accessible web fonts, developers will have to use images containing rendered texts to get text pretty on their web pages, which is not so easy to index for a search engine.

> Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself.

Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.

Here you go: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator. Upload a font and get back a kit with everything you need.

Yeah, try it with Droid Sans, compare the results, report back.

@font-face generators are dime a dozen. The issue is that they generate kits of subpar quality for Google fonts.

Most of the time Font Squirrel has them made already, and you don't need to convert the already stripped down fonts from Google's severs...

Font Squirrel conversion botches up a lot of fonts, Droid Sans being the prime example.

Even if you download it elsewhere first (where elsewhere equals not Google)?

... All the fonts are open source, you can quite literally use Google's native versions. It's not exactly rocket science. You want Droid Sans?

http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/droidsans/v...

... And you got these links from? What is the license for these .eot and .woff? Who says you can self-host them?

Rocket science or not, the bottom line is that these are not available from Google Fonts. You are expected to either use hosted version or muddle through the conversion process.