Custom Fonts - Does enyone know how to use/upload custom fonts?

Beginners
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This thread is/was very helpful. I have a couple of responses and a question.

  1. The link listed above http://www.miltonbayer.com/font-face/ seems to no longer work (it 404s). Darn. (Searches turned up the same link elsewhere on the web, but same result.)

  2. Using some of the other links and info above led me (eventually) to find a really helpful font resource for anyone wishing to host their own fonts. It makes it easy to use Google Fonts, but lets you load them on your own site rather than linking through Google. Here’s link:

https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts

Site by Mario Ranftl I think it’s a GitHub project. Free, of course. And its AWESOME!

It lets you pick from any of the 972 Google Fonts, where you then:

Pick your Character Set,
Choose what Weights/Styles you want,
Decide on your level of support (Modern Browsers vs. Old AND Modern Browsers),
Then it makes the code for you (so you can copy/paste it into your CSS), and finally it
Puts the fonts you chose into a bundle to download straight to your hard drive. Done.

Just click, click, click, easy as pie.

  1. Which leads to my questions:

Is anyone else out there hosting their own fonts?

Why self host? I know that Google Fonts makes things real easy and all, but I’m trying to do stuff without Google. Two reasons. One is Philosophical/Privacy/(Paranoia?) concerns. (Just why does Google make this wonderful service available for free? What are they doing with all that click/data?) It’s a matter of trust, or perhaps mistrust on my part. Call me skeptical. And the other is a preference to keep control over my content, keep it more local. So I want my own fonts on my own machine. (What if Google shuts it off someday?) Same reason I don’t do Adobe anymore - I like my software to be MINE, safely stored on my own computer. (So I switched to Affinity products. And Pinegrow.) Anyway…

And the other reason for self-hosting fonts would be for those folks whose governments don’t allow use of Google (dictators and/or communists and/or lawyers as mentioned by the GDPR dweller higher in this thread).

Are there any downsides to doing this? Any reason to AVOID self-hosted fonts?

I’m assuming the time to load fonts from my Host’s servers would be about the same amount of time it would take to load the fonts from Google. Wouldn’t it? So that’s a wash. … Isn’t it?

Any other reasons?

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