Appropriate Font Format

When uploading local fonts to the program, is it still necessary to include all formats, or will woff or woff2 be sufficient?

I’ve only ever used 1 of the required format. Who ever said you needed all!!!?

Which one?

Ideally you should add woff2, woff and ttf. Blocs will automatically load the fastest format supported by the browser, which will be woff2 in most cases, followed by woff. Woff is only really needed nowadays to cover the later versions of IE and I’m not even sure IE would be compatible with Bootstrap.

The latter ttf should work with those old IE browsers and has widespread compatibility, though not required by modern browsers. There is no need for eot fonts these days, which is deprecated

To see the numbers you can check out the https://caniuse.com/ website. All three are around 98% support with some variation in supported browsers.

In a nutshell you should absolutely include woff2, however the other two allow for fall back positions and may help if there was difficulty loading the woff2 for any reason.

As a small tip you could always find this information in the Blocs documentation. It’s just a little outdated mentioning eot and svg.

https://help.blocsapp.com/knowledge-base/font-manager/

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Thank you for such a thorough explanation.

If the browser, for whatever reason, cannot load the woff2, it will not switch to the other formats.

IMO you only need woff2.

A couple points here:

A) It costs nothing to add the other formats.

B) If a browser cannot find woff2 it would in theory look for woff and load that instead, so at least it can load something.

If inside the CSS a woff2 file is defined, and this is not possible to be loaded by the browser (because for example the file was not uploaded to the server), the browser will not load the tff. I didn’t tests, but that’s my assumption.

Definitely you’re correct in that. But just adding a font file for an ie11 browser won’t help the user much. The user will have many more issues with a non supported ie11 than your not showing font face.

:wink:

I just took a peek on a page using Safari, which does support woff2. It also lists woff and ttf in the CSS if the fonts are loaded.

Anybody still using IE needs all the help they get :rofl:

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It’s amazing MS went from a horrible browser like IE to one of the best, Edge.

Imagine where things would be if IE had not dominated.

I’ve been doing some more research into this and come across a curious issue I hadn’t really considered before, but it relates to licensing issues on commercial fonts. If you are using Google fonts I doubt you need to worry about this, though it might be worth checking.

Some commercial font licences insist that fonts are only added via CSS, which Blocs does, however they forbid the use of ttf files. Although the ttf files would never be served to a modern browser on a Blocs site they could be accessed via the CSS file if somebody made the connection to the direct url on the server.

Commercial font licences can be extremely complex and many would say incomprehensible, but on that basis I would suggest uploading the woff and woff2 versions. Obviously make sure you also have the rights to use the fonts in the first place as well, because there are services out there scanning websites to check for improper usage.