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Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

fonts.bunny.net

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Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#12
post #5

Why wouldn't I just self-host the fonts on my server? What are the benefits of such CDN? Years ago I could understand it because it may reduce latency (cache), but since browsers don't cache from 3rd party servers anymore, also this is argument is obsolet.

I just went through the process of self-hosting Google Fonts. The process is actually surprisingly tricky.

Google Fonts lets you download fonts for desktop use, in the form of .ttf or .otf rather than the .woff[2] with one file per Latin/Greek/Vietnamese/etc. script served by Google Fonts itself. If you want the same font-embedding CSS as Google Fonts itself, you can use https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts (a font browser, outdated, doesn't support font-display: swap), or https://nextgenthemes.com/google-webfont-downloader/ (a converter from Google Fonts CSS URLs to downloadable font packs, supports font-display: swap, it works well but I chose to not host the large CSS files with embedded fonts in base64 format).

As a technical curiosity, the second site can suffer a race condition resulting in partial or broken file downloads (I never tested what happens), if two people request the same font bundle at the same time, and they overwrite each other: https://github.com/nextgenthemes/open-webfonts#bug-reports-a...

I wish browsers would give users an option to set the default font-display policy to swap.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#13

How is this service financed exactly? One would expect this to be at the top of their FAQ.

Presumably marketing budget.

Bunny is an extremely affordable CDN. The business they'd get from medium to large sites that already trust them enough to serve fonts over them should easily make up for it.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#14

On the font pages, they use this as the example sentence: > The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy dog. While the site is trying to be quirky and cute, replacing 'fox' with 'bunny' doesn't showcase what 'f' and 'x' look like.

Shortest I could find in a few minutes:

The quick brown fox jumps over the glazed bunny.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#15

On the font pages, they use this as the example sentence: > The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy dog. While the site is trying to be quirky and cute, replacing 'fox' with 'bunny' doesn't showcase what 'f' and 'x' look like.

Wrote a quick Python script to explore alternatives. The best I found with two words was:

- The quick brown bunny jumps over the lazy podgy fox.

If you want to do it with one word you can do:

- The quick brown bunny jumps over the oversexualized dragonfly.

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#18
Interesting and cool, although apparently no variable fonts[0] as yet. While it’s best to self-host whenever possible, this appears to be a great alternative to GFs if one isn’t willing or able to do that.

[0]: https://web.dev/variable-fonts/

Re: Bunny fonts – privacy respecting drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

#19
post #17

Or better yet, include the ttf/woff/woff2 files inside your project as an npm package using Fontsource[0]. [0]: https://github.com/fontsource/fontsource

Or even better just don't use custom fonts because they break a lot of things anyway.
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