

Keep Google fonts updated on your desktop - robin_reala
http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/download-google-fonts-to-your-desktop.html

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shadowmint
What a completely terrible website.

"Would you like to install our font installer?"

No? You want to add a font to a collection to download it?

"How about installing our mac client to help with that???!!?"

....

do not want.

This is even more painful than downloading the fonts manually.

(edit: _this_ is about 100000% more pleasant to use in every way:
<https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory>, for anyone else looking for an
easy way to get the fonts that does not involve convoluted websites)

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dljsjr
Title is really weirdly worded, and it's not necessarily OP's fault; the
article itself is poorly worded, and it shows in the confusion from the first
few commenters.

Google Web Fonts have always been available offline; when you start browsing
the web fonts and then add one to your "collection", you should be able to
find a link that says "download your collection". That's one way to do it.

Another way to do it is by accessing the font repository on Google Code, which
is not new and has always been around; the fonts are stored in a Mercurial
repo. This is mentioned in a link near the end of the article.

The point of this article, and what isn't really emphasized even though it
should be, is that (apparently, I haven't used it) this SkyFonts tool _keeps
the fonts updated on your local machine_. This might seem like a silly
feature, but I can tell you from experience that the Google Web Fonts do
actually update pretty frequently; not just new fonts getting added, but
existing fonts will also receive updates. Having to pull down the deltas on
the hg repo and then reinstall all of the changed fonts manually when you're
using a large subset of the library is not a trivial task.

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malkia
The app keeps the fonts in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\skyfonts-
google folder - that's a terrible idea, since the Temp folder might be nuked.
It's meant to be for temp files, not cache.

Also the systray app does not respond correctly. And then the manual download
of font? What gives... I'm totally missing what's this about (I'm not a
designer, so I probably don't know much).

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paulirish
Or likely better for HN: get a clone of the repo of google webfonts,
maintained by that team: <https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/>

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Fuzzwah
I'm trying to find an easy way to get them all.... A quick search turned up
this linux script which uses Mercurial.

[http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/automatically-install-all-
goo...](http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/automatically-install-all-google-
web.html)

~~~
joemaller1
I put this up a while back (and need to update it):
<http://joemaller.com/1856/download-google-fonts/>

Google changed repository layout so there are a lot more subfolders to sort
through but `hg clone <https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/`> still
works fine.

(edit: just saw @shadowmint's update, agreed about
<https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory> being better in every way.)

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gavinpc
Somewhat off topic, but I recently found this article about Google Web Fonts
(and the comments) very interesting:

<http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?page_id=3207>

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carlob
Is there any use in this for someone that doesn't use said fonts for
development? Will having them installed locally prevent websites from loading
them as needed, thus speeding up browsing?

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RollAHardSix
You are more then capable of serving the fonts via https with javascript. See:
<https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/webfont_loader>

Edit: Hmm, re-reading your question that may not have been what you looking
for. I would still say yes, it would serve pages faster, as it would serve
pages faster due to the lack of https connection to fetch the font.

Oh dear, I hope I'm helping. :/

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andyhmltn
What if I don't want SkyFonts? What if I just want to download the font file?
Didn't seem very clear in the article.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Add them to your collection, then hit the download arrow in the top right
corner.

~~~
andyhmltn
Thanks!

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bane
How about just bundling the fonts in a zip with a download link?

~~~
CapitalistCartr
<https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory/zipball/master>

