Chapter 7. Faster fonts
This chapter covers
- Limiting the number of fonts through selection
- Rolling your own @font-face cascade
- Understanding the benefits of server compression for older font formats
- Limiting the size of fonts by subsetting
- Using the unicode-range CSS property to serve font subsets
- Managing the loading of fonts through JavaScript APIs
In the preceding chapter, you learned how to optimize images, but as it turns out, many other aspects of a page benefit from optimization as well. In this chapter, you’ll explore yet another asset type commonly found in websites: fonts. Fonts can represent a significant portion of the payload of many websites, and the manner in which they’re delivered is worth careful consideration.
The state of support for fonts has been somewhat fractured since their introduction into the developer’s toolkit. Although support for the CSS @font-face property is ubiquitous, the font formats available for embedding have varying degrees of support.