Glyphance

/ɡlɪfhɑːns/

This is a CLI utility that help reduce load times and bytes by splitting typography files into smaller chunks for different unicode ranges automatically without the tears.

🌈 Features

Configurable.
Config driven.
Docker image, no local install required.
Outputs woff2.
Provides a generated CSS file to simply include.

🚀 Quickstart

Lets assume we want to use 2 variable fonts, one of which has an italic version still as a separate file. Also on our webserver we serve our static fonts from /fonts/.

Get the font files
Write a little config file glyphance.yaml and define the font-families (Mulish and FireCode e.g.) and their files or variations.
Run it.
Use the generate font files and CSS.

example/
├── FiraCode-VariableFont_wght.ttf
├── Mulish-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf
├── Mulish-VariableFont_wght.ttf
└── glyphance.yaml

# glyphance.yaml
fonts:
  'Mulish':
    - file: Mulish-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 200 1000
    - file: Mulish-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 200 1000
        font-style: italic
  'FireCode':
    - file: FiraCode-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 300 700

output:
  prefix: /fonts/

Run

docker run -v $(pwd)/example:/data cupcakearmy/glyphance

Enjoy

Now you can use the generated font files and import the generated/fonts.css into your code.

Remember you can modify the prefix to match the folder structure of your static files.

example/
├── FiraCode-VariableFont_wght.ttf
├── Mulish-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf
├── Mulish-VariableFont_wght.ttf
├── generated
│   ├── 08284d4f696ab68dc7aa21c9c061c534939a3a0c.woff2
│   ├── ...
│   ├── ...
│   ├── f8d95e7f048e130c09015a20689693461cc0dedb.woff2
│   └── fonts.css
└── glyphance.yaml

💡 Inspiration

The idea came mostly at how google fonts subsets their typefaces on Google Fonts. They split the fonts into multiple blocks of unicode chars, and leverage the unicode-range property of @font-face to only deliver the parts of a font that are needed for a website, drastically reducing bytes sent over the wire. Under the hood it uses the amazing fonttools to do the heavy lifting.

📖 API & Documentation

Config file reference can be found under docs/config.

Example

fonts:
  'My Font Familiy':
    - file: ./path/relative/to/config/file.ttf|otf|...
      variable: true # Whether ist's a variable font or not, defaults to false
      css:
        font-style: italic # Custom css properties to be added to the css

output:
  dir: foo # Directory of the output
  prefix: /static/fonts # Prefix to be added to the src URL in the CSS
  clean: true # Whether to clean to output directory first
  css:
    font-weight: 400 # CSS to added to each @font-face. By defaults includes swap, normal weight and style

Provide custom unicode ranges

By default Glyphance uses the same ranges as Google Fonts. However you can customize and specify your own ranges. See the list of possible values.

fonts:
  'Mulish':
    - file: Mulish-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 200 1000
    - file: Mulish-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 200 1000
        font-style: italic
  'FireCode':
    - file: FiraCode-VariableFont_wght.ttf
      variable: true
      css:
        font-weight: 300 700

output:
  ranges:
    abc: U+0061-0063
    numbers: U+0030-0039
    dot: U+002E
  ""

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