github.com/google/fonts.git repo trivia

Incomplete greek-ext subsets

Open Sans (and some others, like Roboto) are advertised as they supporting Extended Greek, but choosing the greek-ext subset will not display Open Sans (or the required font) for this range because they don't actually contain the required characters. You're welcome to commission these characters, though.

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

From time to time, families have been renamed or updated in a way that the existing styles had to change substantially. Until April 2020, the initial family was retained, creating similarly named pairs of directories and often duplicate/redundant, files. The initial families are kept in the API so that people already using them can continue to do so. They are no longer listed in the fonts.google.com catalog, or in the HEAD of the master branch, but the files exist still exist in the commit history.

Initial Family	Current Family	Category
`ofl/alefhebrew`	`ofl/alef`	renamed
`ofl/mrbedford`	`ofl/mrbedfort`	renamed
`ofl/misssaintdelafield`	`ofl/mrssaintdelafield`	renamed
`ofl/siamreap`	`ofl/siemreap`	renamed
`ofl/terminaldosis`	`ofl/dosis`	renamed
`ofl/terminaldosislight`	`ofl/dosis`	expanded
`baloo`	`baloo2`	expanded
`baloobhai`	`baloobhai2`	expanded
`baloobhaijaan`	`baloobhaijaan2`	expanded
`baloobhaina`	`baloobhaina2`	expanded
`baloochettan`	`baloochettan2`	expanded
`balooda`	`balooda2`	expanded
`baloopaaji`	`baloopaaji2`	expanded
`balootamma`	`balootamma2`	expanded
`balootammudu`	`balootammudu2`	expanded
`baloothambi`	`baloothambi2`	expanded

Missing METADATA.pb files

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

.pb vs .textproto

While .textproto is now the canonical extension for Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) text files, we have hundreds of METADATA files with the .pb extension. The inconsistency isn't a practical issue, and as we have internal tools that assume the old filenames, it isn't worth renaming them proactively.

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 fonts.google.com 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 include 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) that are not available in Google Fonts.

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