Font Suggestion: Source Han Sans

[TriforceOfKirby]

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-sans

[alfredxing]

Thanks! There's a huge backlog of fonts already; I don't think I'll be able to start working on adding fonts until my exams are done (start of May or start of June).

[TriforceOfKirby]

I could help add fonts if you want via pull request.

[alfredxing]

@TriforceOfKirby It is a bit tricky, but if you want to tackle it, that would be great!

[TriforceOfKirby]

@alfredxing Ok so I opened the font in FontForge, then went to File>Generate Fonts... selected Web Open Font and clicked Generate.

It gives me a warning message:

You are attempting to save a CID font in a non-CID format.
This is ok, but it means that only the current sub-font will be saved. Is that what you want?

If I click Yes, it also gives me another warning message about the em size being 1000 and that it should normally be a power of 2.

Clicking Yes again results in a woff format font that is 5kB(5,088 bytes) file, the original font in otf format is 16.4MB(16,421,764 bytes).

I'm not sure if this is right, I don't think the font file size should shrink that much.

[alfredxing]

@TriforceOfKirby Yeah, I think it's a problem with this being an Asian font, which might have different data than regular fonts...

I haven't worked with CID fonts before, but maybe try flattening them? This page provides docs on manipulating CID fonts in FontForge.

[TriforceOfKirby]

@alfredxing So flattening seems to work, but I do get a couple warning messages:

Internal Error:
Atempt to output -63677 into a 16-bit field. It will be truncated and the file may not be useful.

I still get the font file, but I'm not sure if it was created correctly. I made a test web page with the font embedded on Dropbox.

[alfredxing]

That should be okay. It'll just be one character probably, and there's not much we can do other than that. Did the em-size error go away?

Thanks for doing this, by the way. It really helps out!

[TriforceOfKirby]

@alfredxing No, the em-size warning still shows. Although, this page on FontForge's website says that 1000 is a perfectly fine em size.

You're welcome! I'll help out with a few more fonts too.

[alfredxing]

Yep, 1000 is fine. I think (though I'm not sure) that 1000 is used for PostScript outlines, and a power of two (like 1024 or 2048) is usually used for TrueType.

[TriforceOfKirby]

@alfredxing So I found a command-line tool by Mozilla for converting sfnt fonts(otf, ttf, etc.) to woff format here.

With that I ran this batch command:
FOR %A IN (*.otf) DO sfnt2woff %A
And it converted all the files without any errors, so would this method of converting the fonts be ok?