🐰 Google Fonts (GF) designates in fact two things. First, it is a directory of fonts, which can be downloaded and used locally on your machine. Second, Google Fonts is also an API that delivers a web service: this means a website can request fonts, and Google Fonts delivers them to the website. In that second case, the fonts are hosted by Google Fonts and not by the website’s own server. This section will help users to understand the implications of publishing fonts on the Google Fonts platform, and will review the basic font production considerings and requirements that are mandatory for any Font to be included in the Catalog.
Google Fonts is the most-used font platform. According to the 2020 Web Almanac (HTTP Archive’s annual state of the web report), 70.3% of websites using font-hosting services use Google Fonts.
As seen in Google Fonts Analytics, the sum of the total views for the fonts in the Catalog increases every day and is currently above 50 trillion views per week, with many fonts seeing over a billion views per week.
Getting a font family published on the website means it has to be included in the GF API. GF requires all families to pass a range of checks that ensure that they work well under a wide range of different environments and for a high proportion of users.
Google treats fonts with the same level of care as they do software.
Google Fonts is doing their best to ensure that publishing or updating fonts are unlikely to break existing documents or websites. Therefore you must follow some rules, which have been adapted from Joel Spolsky’s classic article The 12 steps to better code. Joel’s article explains the benefit of these requirements.
Fonts to be onboarded to Google Fonts are expected to abide by the following requisites:
The design source files (plus scripts) are available in your preferred font editor format.
The file formats most used are UFO, .glyphs, fontforge or fontlab 7. Fontlab V files must be converted to another format because the software runs only on older OS versions.
Fonts should be built in one step. All GF font production tools can be run from the command line. This allows to use them to generate font families by running a single command.
If the build process necessitates more than one step / one command, then every step needed to build the fonts should be included in a single build script. See the chapter about building fonts for more information.
gftools qa, which is a wrapper around Fontbakery and various other proofing scripts), and the results will be reviewed.