Giant custom fonts

At a glance

The community member is trying to upload the Noto Sans SC font, but is facing an error that the asset cannot be bigger than 4.5MB. The comments indicate that Chinese fonts can be very large, up to 10MB per file, due to the large character set. The community members discuss that it is not feasible to use custom Chinese fonts due to the large file sizes, and recommend using "web safe" Chinese fonts instead. The community members also mention that they plan to implement a font optimizer to extract only the used characters, and in the meantime, recommend using web safe fonts or embedding the font using external services. There is no explicitly marked answer.

Useful resources

CCleven

Hi, I am trying to upload some google fonts, Noto Sans SC but facing the following error: Asset "NotoSansSC-VariableFont_wght.ttf" cannot be bigger than 4.5MB. Is it possible to increase the limit? Thanks.

16 comments

OOleg Isonen

something is wrong with your font, it can't be that big, otherwise you will force every user to download it

OOleg Isonen

downloading now to see

OOleg Isonen

indeed 10 mb each variant or 17mb variable font

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OOleg Isonen

Are all chinese fonts this big or is this one an exception?

OOleg Isonen

https://blog.minitheory.com/5-high-quality-chinese-webfont-services-for-your-next-chinese-web-project/#:~:text=Chinese%20character%20set%20is%20huge,to%2010%20MB%20per%20file.

Chinese character set is huge. A standard Chinese character set consists of about 10,000 unique characters, with only 3,000 of those characters common in daily use.

Because of the huge set of characters, Chinese font sizes normally range from 5 to 10 MB per file. Due to this reason, it is not feasible to use CSS @font-face embedding unless your website’s users have ultra-high internet speed. For a long time, people resort to using only “web safe” Chinese fonts, which are:

OOleg Isonen

宋体, Song Ti, a serif typeface used in most older websites.
黑体, Hei Ti, a sans-serif that resembles “Helvetica”.
幼圆, You Yuan, a rounded font like comic-sans, but not as notorious.
隶书, Li Shu, a brush script.
微软雅黑, Microsoft Ya Hei a sans-serif, arguably the most modern-looking Chinese web safe font available. It is available on Windows operating systems since Vista.

OOleg Isonen

For Mac OSX users, there is also a good choice: Hiragino Sans GB. It is a high quality sans-serif typeface similar to Microsoft Ya Hei on Windows.

OOleg Isonen

Ok here is what we can do:

for now we won't support uploading giant font files
we need to add font optimizer that will extract just what's used on the page. We need this also for all other fonts

Until we have implemented this optimizer I am afraid my recommendation is to stick with web safe chinese fonts.

If you really don't care about your users you can embed the font using google api or check out the other font libraries mentioned in that article, they mentioned some have ability to optimize

OOleg Isonen

What I am noticing we need to fix is that you currently can't choose Song Ti, Hei Ti and others from the list at all without uploading them.

OOleg Isonen

If these fonts are considered web safe, then they should be in the list of the fonts.

OOleg Isonen

Current workaround is to use hmtl embed or project settings to set the font family on the body

this is going to render that font and on my machine it actually renders the right glyphs, seems like it is indeed installed

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