fontsource VS google-webfonts-helper

Fontsource[0] is also an easy way to self-host variable fonts via NPM packages.

[0] https://fontsource.org/?variable=true

A few years ago, while I was still in high school, I began learning how to create websites purely for fun. One thing I found to be tedious was self-hosting fonts, with existing solutions to improve it completely abandoned. Consequently, I decided to learn a bit more about JavaScript by rewriting and improving these abandoned projects which led to the creation of Fontsource[0].

This project has undoubtedly set of a series of impactful events in my life, and I attribute many of my successes to it. I've had opportunities to network with numerous amazing engineers through it, leading to a part-time role and multiple internships. Companies that approached me for support also wanted to keep in touch! I also graduate this year and I am going with a full-time role from one of the aforementioned internships.

While I acknowledge my circumstances are extremely fortunate, I genuinely believe that having open source projects early on in your career can significantly contribute to standing out as a developer.

[0] https://fontsource.org

Tip: more privacy friendly Google alternatives are available and super easy to use: https://fontsource.org/

I switched most of my sites to use it and I’ve been quite happy so far.

No need to leak data to Google.

For weirder stuff (e.g. https://tidings.potato.horse) I use sites like dafont.com and convert fonts using Font Squirrel.

Fontsource publishes all Google Fonts fonts as NPM packages, allowing you to easily import them with modern bundlers.

I personally like using FontSource for this, they have some extra fonts beyond Google Fonts too

I stumbled upon fontsource.org the other day and I found the idea of installing fonts from npm packages appealing.

To do this with SvelteKit, you can use the Fontsource project. They host all of the Google Fonts catalogue as NPM packages.

I use https://gwfh.mranftl.com/ to grab the fonts and CSS for local use.

If you do want to self-host the fonts, there is a handy Web Fonts helper which generates the CSS and lets you download the .woff2 files you’ll need.

google webfonts helper - https://gwfh.mranftl.com

According to the Cloudflare December monthly stats, I had roughly 57k unique users, 15m requests, 1,3TB traffic. Though, most requests are likely to be bots/integrators spamming the API...

Running on a bare metal k8s cluster (libvirt) on top of a single dedicated Hetzner server, ~70€/month. Not going to monetize it, but will maybe accept donations/sponsorings in the future...

However I felt like this solution is quite opionated, and therefore I'd like to promote a different non-opionated solution (if anyone haven't heard of it yet) to get any font plus minimalistic styles: https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper

Just moved off https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper today from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced current the Heroku dyno with a 301: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect

AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for *.herokuapp.com apps without actually running a dyno there.

Let me throw in this little life safer here, that generates the CSS and bundles the font files for you: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/

As an alternative there is the google-webfonts-helper. It can be used online and regardless of the operating system.

As you can see, the font loading with Google Fonts can be complicated. However, you can reduce how many requests are needed to just one by self-hosting the font and putting the @font-face declaration inside your CSS bundle instead of an external stylesheet. A tool like Google Webfonts Helper can be helpful for this.