do you have adobe fonts that you bought and are available through adobe account?
how many adobe fonts are you using?
Yea Adobe sells fonts and on Webflow through the Adobe API you can browse your fonts and import whole font families.
It's more convenient than uploading fonts manually, but there are privacy and performance concerns. iirc, using this service is less performant and allows Adobe to track some things
Best practice is to download the font families you want from whatever source, then upload them to your project manually @tjrowe
I am asking because I would like to understand those questions, there are serveral options to make it convenient.
- Make a sharable fonts manager so you can use all your fonts across all your sites
- Create a proxy that can fetch your adobe fonts and cache them directly from adobe via our server, without exposing your users to adobe, same can be done for google fonts
If there are only few fonts you use in total, its not a big deal to upload them in each project.
If you are making many projects and there are many fonts then solution 1 might be what you want, also as an agency you may want to be able to maintain your collection with all fonts you want your members to be using. Uploading them once doesn't seem like a big deal.
I was referencing the Adobe API that Taylor mentioned above. It's just a convenience thing on smaller site located in America intended for an American audience. For those who have Adobe accounts, you get access to quite a large library of nice type faces that you can easily connect to a website without having to purchase the font separately.
It does cause a bit of a performance hit but not too bad if you don't go crazy with fonts. Recent test with a hand-coded site took me from a 99 to a 95 on the Google speed test.
just for me to understand, you can only get that price if you use their api?
privacy issue still remains, your users are now loading the fonts from adobe, you are exposing your users, its not as bad as google fonts, but still you don't know what they are trackign
So it sounds like for @tjrowe 's use case, uploading the font would be the best practice.
A shareable fonts manager and/or a proxy would be super cool to overcome the limitations of using a fonts distributor API
A limitation you may not know of is that Adobe expects you to organize your fonts into 'projects'. In Webflow, you don't get all of your fonts available - you get to choose which Adobe 'project' to apply to the Webflow project. Not sure if this is a Adobe limitation or what but it might be an obstacle...
You pay for an Adobe subscription and you get Adobe Fonts with it. You can't buy the fonts individually from Adobe and its not cheaper to use API.
If you are a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud in order to access their various apps, you also get access to the Adobe Fonts API (used to be TypeKit).
I'm not aware of being able to purhcase access to the Adobe Fonts API as a stand alone option.
Your a faster typist than me, Taylor.
so if you are subscriber of the adobe cloud you can't download that font and use it on your website?
Correct. You dan't download the fonts.
this is really strange, technically you are downloading them when user visits your site
That doesn't sound right. You need to download the fonts to use them
iirc you can download and uplaod them. License to use them in your projects is granted via your adobe subscription.
They are probably in some Adobe Fonts folder somewhere on your desktop if you have used them recently @tjrowe
I can only imagine that Adobe prohibits download because they want you to pay for subscription and if you don't pay you loose license?
I should be more specific, Adobe doesn't give you legal permission to download the fonts and upload them to a service like Webstudio unless something has changed recently.
You could always purhcase the fonts from the original type foundries.
yeah sounds like adobe makes a rental service for fonts
the only thing we can do then is to be a proxy between them and visitors and not allow track them
and also this will make fonts as fast as manually uploaded once
so ideal ux would be to be able to browser and choose fonts from webstudio builder, but let us handle the injection in a way that is fast/cached
well unless this is also illegal
if that's illegal I am not sure I want them, because I care about performance and privacy of user sites as this reflects on webstudio brand
Afraid I don't know the legalities of that.
The way Webflow handles it is pretty friendly to the designer.
I'm sure Adobe is only going to want this to be available to people with Adobe CC accounts rather than just anyone with a Webstudio account.
I suspect there isn't a great deal of demand for this, most people seem to use Google fonts these days. But it would be nice if it were possible.
The way Webflow handles it is pretty friendly to the designer.
yes and Webflow doesn't give a s. about privacy and their performance is bad
It does cause a bit of a performance hit but not too bad if you don't go crazy with fonts. Recent test with a hand-coded site took me from a 99 to a 95 on the Google speed test.
btw did you use
https://pagespeed.web.dev/ or did you use lighthouse in dev tools on your desktop locally?
That measurement was with dev tools. pagespeed.web.dev was a few points slower for both options.
in particular mobile view of pagespeed.web.dev is important
I bet you lost like 10% in performance at the very least
these things accumulate in a large site and in the end you get a webflow that's barely at 30-40% total score
add 2 fonts and you are basically badly performing site, with fonts hosted externally, we can't optimize them, we have amazing plans to completely optimize fonts in a way almost nobody does
it will allow us to have tiny fonts
So I will be against loading external fonts entirely, you can do that still using html embed component or head code in the end, but I won't be adding a particularly nice experience to creat badly performing sites lol
Got it. Looking forward to see what you do with this product.
Hello, wondering if this issue was ever added to the Wishlist in Github, or considered after this discussion ended, back in 11/2023?
cc @Oleg Isonen
Adobe Fonts is a tempting possibility, for the great selection of premium typefaces. But I also get the privacy and performance concerns, and am not willing to compromise that only because I'm cheap 😉
Hey, you can use any fonts by just uploading them
we haven't added any external services to fonts picker
Yeah, but Adobe wouldn't like that, if they were ever to find out somehow 😄
if we ever add a tool with all fonts it will be hosted through us
no, there is no issue with that
or do you mean because they have a subscription for hosting fonts?
"No," as in "Adobe wouldn't mind" or "Adobe couldn't find out?"
adobe has no influence weather someone is self-hosting their fonts or not if they bought a license
Yeah, because they don't offer the option to download fonts directly. Dunno. Will investigate further 😉
I mean, they didn't say it was illegal, just that Adobe doesn't offer that option 😄
Ah well... I guess if people want super fine and special fonts, they'll have to buy them or license them in some other way.
yes so in that case its not legal to download them, because they are being leased not bought and adobe counts traffic to pay royalties
there are free fonts though as well
True. Fancy fonts are a niche thing. If I'll ever buy a font, it will be through
https://www.youworkforthem.com/fonts because they offer one-time payment licenses for pretty darn fair prices, relatively speaking.
