How To Use Google Font Locally

If Google can supply your data to NSA, you definitely can do reverse engineering! Here is How To Use Google Font Locally Maintaining the Law. Google officially answers the question “Can I download the fonts on Google Fonts to my own computer?” as yes. In other words, if the Font itself is of Open Source (i.e. the moron developer like me has added GNU GPL 3.0 License before adding to their library) or if you have Paid for the font for the purpose (they are not available via Google Font Library but other services). The question answer can be found here :

We do neither download and use Google’s any font or use their scripts.

How To Use Google Font Locally – Understand the Basics

There are lot of reasons why you will want to use an open source font delivered from your own server. When you are seeking with the key phrase How To Use Google Font Locally, that simply means that you have yet not understood a basic thing – most of these fonts come with fully open source license, because they are not developed by Google. The developers usually make the fonts available elsewhere. You must read these articles – Fonts : Resources and Types of According to License; Serving Fonts from Rackspace Cloud Files CDN; How To Use Any Web Font From Own Hosted Library and Base64 Encoding for Font CSS.

In other words, before doing the tougher way – trying to download the Google Font on your computer; you should search the web with the name. There is enough chance that the Font is available under GNU GPL 3.0 or compatible License. It will save your huge time.

How To Use Google Font Locally – Methods

Take that, I suddenly liked Lato Thin 100. The reason to like is nothing but it looks like premium font Proxima Nova, these slick fonts looks great on Retina Display screens. Instead of using Google Fonts or doing tougher reverse engineering, you can fully legally download the fonts from the developer’s website :

Cur­rently, the Lato fonts on Google Fonts are still the older 1.0 ver­sion. If you™d like to use the new 2.007 ver­sion on your web­site, you need to install a œself-‹‹hosted web­font kit on your server. We do not pro­vide sup­port or instruc­tions how to install these fonts on your web­site! You need to fig­ure it out on your own!

The developers uses Google Font to get back link and popularity. How you will use is written in the linked guides. We love Base64 encoded fonts. You can use skip that complexity. Still in short :

If you want to use a bash script to download Google Font, here is readymade way :

Quite peculiarly, the original bash script had no Open Source license. It is a moral crime to use such Closed Source Licensed script on GNU Linux machines. Basically it is not required in most cases, still, here is how to run it :

That is all you were probably searching for.