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In my mini web application, I wonder whats the best way of serving the 600+ fonts from google web fonts library to my users, primary concerns are the font file sizes, ajax calls delay.

Two possible options that come to mind are:

  • Ajax calls to download the font when the user scrolls through the dropdown list of those 600 fonts.

  • Create & store images of fonts on server, only retrieve those images when the user scrolls down the drop down list, subsequently, when the user clicks on a particular image, only then does the font file download locally.

Edit: To put the question more clearly forward, I am wondering whats the best option I have of serving 600+ fonts to a user of my font web app?

Thanks

sarfraz
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  • Your post is missing question itself and also missing definition of "better". I.e. good idea would be to implement (or at least design) 2 solutions you have mentioned and explain what you think make one better than the other, plus what is still missing from better one. – Alexei Levenkov Jun 03 '13 at 04:07
  • @AlexeiLevenkov, thanks for the pointer, have worded a separate question. – sarfraz Jun 03 '13 at 07:37
  • I guess I put my suggestions in wrong order... There is still no definition of "better" in your post. I.e. "ajax calls delay" can be easily eliminated by loading all fonts at the same time - but you probably will not consider it "better"... You did not even said what users are currently complaining about or where speed/readability/robustness/coolness/... issues of your current solution are. I personally don't believe there are any "best" options to show 600 items of any kind in dropdown... – Alexei Levenkov Jun 03 '13 at 16:04
  • Could you add some details about the purpose of your application? What does it actually do? Chances are pretty good that you don't need all 600 at once (if you do, my advice is to seriously re-think your graphic and functional design). There's probably a much better way to organize your content to avoid having to download 600 of *anything*. – djangodude Jun 03 '13 at 16:51
  • @djangodude thanks & yes we dont actually need to have the 600 fonts loaded at once. The app. is a designing tool for creating your own label (fashion brand), so the goal being that the users can play with different fonts to create their own label. Currently, we are siding with loading images (pre-made) of each font & displaying series of 10 font images at a time, this way, the app. only downloads the font whose image is clicked upon by the user. Would love to hear thoughts & better suggestions. – sarfraz Jun 04 '13 at 03:33
  • I would consider applying some organization/categorization to the fonts at the top-level, minimum, and probably even 2 levels deep. There are traditional/formal typographic categories such as serif, sans-serif, etc., but in your case you might want to come up with your own scheme. This would not only help you avoid trying to load a menu full of 600 fonts in one go, but would also help your users in selecting something appropriate to the style of their label/brand. – djangodude Jun 04 '13 at 18:21
  • pre-made the preview images and cache them in user's browser. Or pre-made preview fonts files which have very small size. – cuixiping Jan 24 '16 at 06:56

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