12 replies

1. Zeno ✨ 5 min later

   @zachleat Even worse, 4 woffs for full compatibility:

   ZachRegular.woff
   ZachRegular.woff2
   ZachBold.woff
   ZachBold.woff2

   1. Aleš Roubíček 8 min later

      @zeno @zachleat Do we still care about IE?

      1. Zach Leatherman 17 min later

         @alesroubicek @zeno I don’t know her!!

2. Jesse Janowiak 29 min later

   @zachleat inside of everyone are two woffs, a ttf, an otf, and possibly an svg.

   1. Zach Leatherman 31 min later

      @wonkeythemonkey please not the svg!! 😅😅

   2. P4 2 hr later

      @wonkeythemonkey @zachleat in the deepest, darkest part that everyone tries to pretend is not there, there's an eot... waiting.

3. Robin Whittleton 1 hr later

   @zachleat I looked into this for the day job, but there’s no value unless you specifically want to use the variability.

   1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

      @robinwhittleton yeah, it depends on the font and the use case but usually saves KB when you compare two font files of the same typeface versus one variable! also solves the independent repaint/reflow problem: https://www.zachleat.com/web/fout-vs-foit/

      1. Robin Whittleton 1 hr later

         @zachleat maybe we’ve heavily optimised our files already, but I was seeing more KB with a variable font. Partially this was down to an unknown-to-me semibold in Noto Sans variable. But even after stripping that out, the axes added enough that it wasn’t worth it.

         Where we did see a big benefit from variable fonts was (ironically) not in the font itself, but in halving the size of the CJK font chunk CSS.

         1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

            @robinwhittleton I’d be curious to read more about your experience!

         2. Aleš Roubíček 2 hr later

            @robinwhittleton @zachleat Do you optimize for Unicode ranges (aka subsetting) or do you use full Unicode in one file?

            1. Robin Whittleton 2 hr later

               @alesroubicek @zachleat definitely Unicode ranges. We could do more for sure (I’m looking into it a little as a side project), but we’ve followed Google’s chunking strategy and ranges for most languages.