Fontsource

An updating monorepo full of self-hostable Open Source fonts bundled into individual NPM packages! Inspired by the aging Typefaces project and primarily built using Google Font Metadata.

Our supported font search directory can be found here (in very early development and may contain outdated information) or alternatively in Markdown format here.

• Self-hosting brings significant performance gains as typically loading fonts from hosted font services, such as Google Fonts, lead to an extra (render blocking) network request. To provide perspective, for simple websites it has been seen to double visual load times. Benchmarks can be found here and here.

• Fonts remain version locked. Google often pushes updates to their fonts without notice, which may interfere with your live production projects. Manage your fonts like any other NPM dependency.

• Your fonts load offline. Often there may be situations, like working in an airplane or train, leaving you stranded without access to your online hosted fonts. Have the ability to keep working under any circumstance.

• Support for fonts outside the Google Font ecosystem. This repository is constantly evolving with other Open Source fonts. Feel free to contribute!

Installation

Fontsource assumes you are using a bundler, such as Webpack, to load in CSS. Solutions like CRA, Gatsby and Next.js are prebuilt examples that are compatible.

This is an installation example using Open Sans, applicable to all other fonts searchable via NPM or the packages directory.

yarn add @fontsource/open-sans // npm install @fontsource/open-sans

Then within your app entry file or site component, import it in. For example in Gatsby, you could choose to import it into a layout template (layout.js), page component (index.js), or gatsby-browser.js.

import "@fontsource/open-sans" // Defaults to weight 400 with normal variant.

Fontsource allows you to select weights and even individual styles, allowing you to cut down on payload sizes to the last byte! Utilizing the CSS unicode-range selector, all language subsets are accounted for.

import "@fontsource/open-sans/500.css" // Weight 500.
import "@fontsource/open-sans/900-italic.css" // Italic variant.

Alternatively, the same solutions could be imported via SCSS!

@import "[email protected]/open-sans/index.css";
@import "[email protected]/open-sans/300-italic.css";

For more advanced setups, you can use our highly customisable Sass mixins that can modify many of the existing @font-face variables.

@import "[email protected]/open-sans/scss/mixins";

// Uses a unicode-range map to automatically generate multiple @font-face rules.
@include fontFace(
  $weight: 500,
  $display: fallback,
  $fontDir: "[email protected]/open-sans/files"
);

// Fully customisable single @font-face mixin.
@include fontFaceCustom(
  $weight: 600,
  $display: optional,
  $woff2Path: "#{$fontDir}/custom-file.woff2",
  $unicodeRange: false
);

We also have default variables that you can use!

@import "[email protected]/open-sans/scss/mixins";

$style: italic;

@include fontFace($weight: 500);
@include fontFace($weight: 600);

// Applies italic to both @includes.

You can see all of the existing inputtable mixin variables here.

Do confirm on Google Fonts (or elsewhere) whether your font supports a certain subset, weight or style beforehand as these examples may not reflect actual compatibility.

Finally, you can reference the font name in a CSS stylesheet, CSS Module, or CSS-in-JS.

body {
  font-family: "Open Sans";
}

Variable Fonts

This repository supports variable fonts that Google Fonts provide. You can find the full list of available options here. Instructions on how to install and use can be found on the relevant package README.

Additional Options

In the rare case you need to individually select a language subset and not utilize the CSS unicode-range selector, you may specify the import as follows. This is especially not recommended for languages, such as Japanese, with a large amount of characters.

import "@fontsource/open-sans/latin-ext.css" // All weights with normal style included.
import "@fontsource/open-sans/cyrillic-ext-500.css" // Weight 500 with normal style.
import "@fontsource/open-sans/greek-900-italic.css" // Italic variant.

Examples above may not reflect actual variant availability.

Migrating from previous versions

See CHANGELOG.md for more details.

Adding New Fonts

For Open Source fonts that are not automatically updated by the Google ecosystem, we have a generic packager that builds CSS files for the project.

Make a request by creating an issue!

Licensing

It is important to always read the license for every font that you use. Most of the fonts in the collection use the SIL Open Font License, v1.1. Some fonts use the Apache 2 license. The Ubuntu fonts use the Ubuntu Font License v1.0.

You can find their specific licenses on each package README.md.

Other Notes

Feel free to star and contribute new ideas to this repository that aim to improve the performance of font loading, as well as expanding the existing library we already have. Any suggestions or ideas can be voiced via an issue.