Convert fonts to WebFont.ru

Hello!

A year and a half ago, an article was published about testing font converters, in which we said that we would do our own converter. And a week ago, it was successfully launched.

Our main task was to achieve sane quality so that there were no dancing and sticking letters. The search for the optimal solution lasted a very long time. Various tools and settings have been tried. For example, we almost completely abandoned the most popular conversion tool - FontForge. As a result, similar results were obtained (it was and it was):


In some cases, it turned out to even improve not very high-quality source fonts.

In fact, in Fontsquirrel you can achieve an acceptable quality of fonts, if you play with the settings. Other converters do not offer any settings at all. In our converter, too, there are no settings yet, but the quality is decent.

Formats

The second task we had was implementing woff2. This is a relatively new font format, which differs from the previous version in improved compression. According to the test fonts from Google Fonts increase compression was observed from 12 to 61 percent.

In our example, we obtained the following results *

Font	ttf (kb)	woff	woff2
Open sans	217	58	44
PT sans	429	51	39
Lato	632	315	200
Fira sans	152	103	69
Roboto	126	80	60

The hinting adjustment affected the font size, an example should be taken as a comparison of woff \ woff2

At the moment, woff2 is supported by webkit browsers (except Safari) and Firefox.

The second change in the formats we had was the rejection of eot. Since the summer of 2014, we have not supported this format in imports, but judging by the statistics, this absolutely did not stop anyone - traffic has never sagged. Now, looking at the statistics on browsers in Runet, we decided to completely abandon this archaism. In many cases, systemic sans-serif, serif, and monospace in the font-family can be used for degradation.

Subsetting

Several times they pointed out to us the advantage of “squirrel” in its ability to convert not the whole font, but certain characters. This is one of the key points in optimizing the loading of a custom font page. The task was also solved. Now you can convert any (well, almost) number of characters from any font.

For example, the Lato font in Latin and Cyrillic letters weighs 46kb, and if you select only numbers, it will be about 5.5kb.

You can select as whole ranges, or by entering certain characters.

Future challenges

In the near future, the converter will be supplemented with some options. You will be able to convert several files at a time, the ability to save the font in base64 and, possibly, some hinting settings and font smoothing mechanisms.

Not much time has passed since the converter started, so some more bugs and misunderstandings are possible. If you find this, please signal somewhere.

The converter is available by clicking "Get Font"> Advanced Features

Other

Together with the release of the converter, the interface was updated and the font collection was revised. As a result, some connected fonts stopped working. Particularly touchy users reproached us with a frivolous approach to business. In this regard, we recall that WebFont.ru is not a replacement or an analog of Google Fonts. In almost every article, and at any opportunity, we talk about this, and on the site in the window with the font connection there is even a warning. You can connect fonts, but solely for the purpose of testing or selecting the appropriate style. Thank you for understanding.

To quickly respond to such changes, we recommend subscribing to our communities in the social. networks, information about all changes appears there promptly.

Another useful innovation was the publication of original fonts. Before that, we noticed that the designers downloaded web fonts, pulled out ttf from there and installed them on the system. The downside was that such fonts were truncated to two ranges: latin + cyrillic. Now all fonts are available in separate archives with a full set of characters in otf \ ttf formats.

That's all for today, we are waiting for your feedback and suggestions.

Thanks for attention.