使用网络字体会下载整个字形集吗？

Question

There is a question posed here at work whether if we use a CDN-based font, such as Font Awesome, if the entire font is downloaded right away, or if the glyphs are only fetched if actually used.

I have people who want to create custom "sub-sets" of font awesome to reduce page weight, and I'd like to know if this is really an issue.

Answer 1

yes, it downloads the entire set. But the entire set is incredibly small compared to bitmap images. Since fonts are just vector images

**edit to answer your comment Does anyone have an idea about the weight of Font Awesome, in K? It depends on the browser there are 4 different formats for the different browsers.

1. OTF 62kb
2. eot 38kb
3. svg 198kb
4. ttf 79kb
5. woff 44kb

It uses in its CSS this:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'FontAwesome';
  src: url('../../../fonts/fontawesome/fontawesome-webfont.eot?v=4.0.3');
  src: url('../../../fonts/fontawesome/fontawesome-webfont.eot?#iefix&v=4.0.3') format('embedded-opentype'), url('../../../fonts/fontawesome/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=4.0.3') format('woff'), url('../../../fonts/fontawesome/fontawesome-webfont.ttf?v=4.0.3') format('truetype'), url('../../../fonts/fontawesome/fontawesome-webfont.svg?v=4.0.3#fontawesomeregular') format('svg');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

And the browser will pickup on whatever format it understands and download that one. It will not download all of them. It will only download the first file it understands

Answer 2

While file size is not a concern in most Western font sets, it does become cumbersome with Asian font sets which include some 7000 glyphs. Google Noto Sans CJK for example, is a nice looking web font, but weighs in between 1MB and 2MB for each font-weight. Wondering how this is best approached.