Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

TOPIC: DROID

Self hosting Google fonts

14th November 2022

One thing that I have been doing across my websites is to move away from using Google web fonts, using the advice on the Switching.Software website. While I have looked at free web font directories like 1001 Free Fonts or DaFont, they do not have the full range of bolding and character sets that I desire, so I opted instead for the Google Webfonts Helper website. That not only offered copies of what Google has, but also created a portion of CSS that I could add to a stylesheet on a website, making things more streamlined. At the same time, I also took the opportunity to change some of the fonts that were being used for the sake of added variety. Open Sans is good, but there are other acceptable sans-serif options like Mulish or Nunita as well, so these got used.

Changing to web fonts

12th February 2012

While you can add Windows fonts to Linux installations, I have found that their display can be flaky to say the least. Linux Mint and Ubuntu display them as sharp as I'd like, but I have struggled to get the same sort of results from Arch Linux, while I am not so sure about Fedora or openSUSE either.

This led me to explore web fonts for my websites, with Google Web Fonts meeting my needs through options like Open Sans and Arimo. There have been others with which I have dallied, such as Droid Sans, but these are the ones on which I have settled for now. Both are in use on this website now, and I added calls for them to the web page headers using the following code (lines are wrapping due to space constraints):

<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300italic,400italic,600italic,700italic,400,300,600,700" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Arimo:400,400italic,700,700italic' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

With those lines in place, it then is a matter of updating font-family and font declarations in CSS style sheets with "Open Sans" or "Arimo" as needed, while keeping alternatives defined in case the Google font service goes down for whatever reason. A look at a development release of the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme caused me to come across Open Sans and I like it for its clean lines and Arimo, which was found by looking through the growing Google Web Fonts catalogue, is not far behind. Looking through that catalogue now causes for me a round of indecision since there is so much choice. For that reason, I think it's better to be open to the recommendations of others.

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