Convert fonts to WebFont.ru

Hello!



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



Our main task was to achieve the imputed quality so that there were no dancing and sticky 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 became):

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



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

Formats

The second task we had was the introduction of woff2. This is a relatively new font format, differing from the previous version with improved compression. According to Google Fonts font testing , an increase in compression from 12 to 61 percent was observed.



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 size of the font was influenced by the hinting adjustment, 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 format 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 - the traffic has never sunk. Now, looking at the statistics on browsers in Runet, we decided to completely abandon this archaism. For degradation in many cases, system sans-serif, serif and monospace can be used in the font-family.

Subsetting

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



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



You can select as whole ranges, as well as entering certain characters.

Challenges for the future

In the near future, the converter will be supplemented with some options. It will be possible to convert several files at once, the ability to save the font in base64 and, possibly, some settings of the hinting and font smoothing mechanisms.



Not much time has passed since the launch of the converter, 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 have stopped working. Particularly touchy users reproached us with a frivolous approach to business. In this regard, we remind you that WebFont.ru is not a replacement or analog of Google Fonts. In almost every article and at any opportunity we talk about it, and there is even a warning on the site in the window with the font connection. It is possible to connect fonts, but only for the purpose of testing or selecting the appropriate outline. Thank you for understanding.



To quickly respond to such changes, we recommend to subscribe 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 designers downloaded web fonts, pulled out ttf from there and installed it in the system. The downside was that such fonts were trimmed to two ranges: latin + cyrillic. Now, all fonts are available in separate archives with a full set of characters in the otf \ ttf formats.



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



Thanks for attention.