Showing posts with label font. Show all posts
Showing posts with label font. Show all posts

Improving Google Fonts Performance

Mike's Notes

I use the Noto Sans font at Ajabbi. This may improve speed performance.

Resources

References

  • Reference

Repository

  • Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
  • Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

18/05/2025

Improving Google Fonts Performance

By: Cosima Mielke (cm)
Smashing Magazine: #475, 25/09/2024

How can we make Google Fonts load faster? Scott Jehl set up a repository for testing Google’s default font embed code against more optimal approaches. The setup loads the SUSE Google Font from Google’s font server in a variety of ways to find out which approach is most efficient.

As Scott’s tests show, loading fonts with @font-face is faster than the render-blocking default embed we get from Google. The greatest performance improvements show when @font-face is combined with font-display: swap. In this case, text rendering happens a full second sooner than the default Google embed. And even when the page doesn’t use font-display: swap, using @font-face still renders the pages 300ms earlier than the Google standard solution. (cm)

Noto

Mike's Notes

I am thinking about what default font to use on the website. Noto is open-source and covers a lot of writing scripts.

Resources

References

  • Reference

Repository

  • Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
  • Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

17/05/2025

Article

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 21/05/2024

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

Pipi needs to be available in many different languages.

I use an automated build process to create a separate User Interface (UI) in each language, using separate code and databases.

One problem is the translation of the strings used in the UI.

Another problem to solve is what fonts to use.

As it turns out, Google has a project called Noto ("No Tofo") to provide a font that could be used for the many writing systems described by Unicode and 6,500 + languages.

"Noto is a collection of high-quality fonts with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles, in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems." - Noto Dashboard.

Noto is open-source and freely available from GitHub. One repository per font, e.g., Tibetan, Mongolian, and Latin.

SIL International is involved. I'm embedding their excellent keyman project on the Ajabbi websites to give people a web keyboard in their own language. Several thousand different language keyboards are now available.

This website is presented in Noto Sans font, which I'm making the default font for all Ajabbi websites and the UI.

For example, a Balinese version of Ajabbi would use the NotoSansBalinese font. However, a logged-in administrator or user can change that font to another Balinese font.

There are regular releases. Here are 11 releases from May 2024.

Presentations

Noto Fonts: Preserving Endangered Languages | S. Zaraysky/M. Jeziorek/D. Crossland | ATypI 2020

Creating Noto for Google

TUG 2020 — Steven Matteson — The road to NOTO

Self-hosting fonts explained (including Google fonts) // @font-face tutorial