Self-host your fonts for better performance

Re:Self-host your fonts for better performance by acdha on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:58AM (#25302238)

Copyright and size: fonts are larger than you might think because they need full Unicode support and good fonts have tuned variants for different weights, styles, and sizes, along with alternate symbols and ligatures, etc. which all add up.

Self-hosting is the way to go since it gives you full artistic control and you can use things like the Unicode-range CSS property to tell clients how to combine smaller fonts so you can support many languages without forcing a French browser to download a ton of Chinese glyphs which aren’t used on the page.

Another nice option we have now is using font-display to allow using a similar system font until downloads are completed, which can work really well for slow connections:

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2020/a-font-display-setting-...

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Re:Self-host your fonts for better performance by lukepothier on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:43AM (#25303518)

> fonts are larger than you might think because they need full Unicode support

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but don't the vast majority of fonts _not_ include full Unicode support, or even close to it? I know of GNU Unifont, but not many people are using that on the web...

I take your point on selectively downloading the relevant glyphs for the user's locale, but this could be done by the browser too - it is aware of the locale.

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Re:Self-host your fonts for better performance by acdha on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:12AM (#25303932)

full coverage, yes, that's relatively uncommon but the most popular fonts will have a wide variety of languages and that adds up even if you don't support Chinese but do want coverage of the range of fonts designers want to use.

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