github.com/google/fonts.git repo trivia

Google Fonts Repo Wiki

The previous fonts Mercurial repository had a wiki at https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/wiki which is no longer available. The contents of the wiki are now available here:

https://github.com/googlefonts/gf-docs

Duplicated fonts

There are some similarly named pairs of directories which each have identically named font files. These files are redundant, and exist following the renaming of a family. The initial directories are kept so that people already using that initial name can continue to do so. They are no longer listed in the main www.google.com/fonts directory, but the files exist in this repo since they are still served via the Google Fonts API.

ofl/alefhebrew and ofl/alef contain Alef-Regular.ttf and Alef-Bold.ttf
ofl/mrbedford and ofl/mrbedfort contain MrBedfort-Regular.ttf
ofl/mrssaintdelafield and ofl/misssaintdelafield contain MrsSaintDelafield-Regular.ttf
ofl/siamreap and ofl/siemreap contain Siemreap.ttf
ofl/terminaldosis and ofl/dosis contain the same files (renamed) and ofl/terminaldosislight contain TerminalDosis-Light.ttf

Missing METADATA.pb files

Fonts in Early Access do not have METADATA.pb files.

Install on Windows

You can install all of the fonts using Windows PowerShell. Change directories to the folder where you downloaded the package, and run the following command:

$fonts = (New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application).Namespace(0x14)
dir ofl/*/*.ttf | %{ $fonts.CopyHere($_.fullname) }

3rd Party Directories

The www.google.com/fonts directory is accompanied by a Google Fonts Developer API which provides raw data for constructing such a directory in JSON format. Here is a list of 3rd party directories:

There are also handcrafted directories with rich samples:

Rightsholder contacts

This shell command shows all email addresses for font copyright holders listed in the METADATA.pb files:

grep copyright\: */*/MET* | grep \@ |  perl -ne'if(/[\w\.\-\_]+@([\w\-\_]+\.)+[A-Za-z]{2,4}/g){print "$&\n"}' | sort | uniq

This shell command shows all the families without a contact email address:

grep copyright\: */*/MET* | grep -v \@ | cut -d\: -f1 | cut -d\/ -f2 | uniq | sort

The copyright holders of those families are mostly Google, SIL, Adobe, Canonical, Naver, and a couple of outliers.

Articles about Google Fonts

Some interesting articles about Google Fonts:

Interesting Libre Fonts Not In Google Fonts

Here is a list of some libre fonts made for special purposes (emoij, math, icon, etc) are not available in Google Fonts.

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