[HN Gopher] Show HN: Fontofweb - Discover Fonts Used on a Websit...
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Show HN: Fontofweb - Discover Fonts Used on a Website or Websites
Using Font(s)
Hey HN, I've been working on fontofweb.com on and off for the past
4 years, and I'm keen to share it with you. It lets you type in the
URL of any website and see exactly how the fonts are used: all the
weights, line heights, and sizes. A big plus is that it doesn't
require a Chrome extension, unlike a lot of other tools in this
space. You can also search for a specific font and find websites
using it. For example, check out sites using Inter:
https://fontofweb.com/w/inter. This reverse font search even
supports looking for multiple fonts at once, like here's an example
with Inter and Space Mono: https://fontofweb.com/w/inter/space-
mono. My goal with Font of Web is to build up a comprehensive
database of font usage across the web. By collecting and analyzing
this data, I believe we can uncover some valuable trends, such as:
* Common font pairings * Popular heading fonts over time * Market
share of commercial fonts * Top font foundries based on actual
usage I originally built a version of this four years ago and was
surprised by how much organic interest it received. I've now
rebuilt the tool from scratch, moving away from browserless.io --
which was quite expensive -- to an invisible iframe approach with a
proxied URL to handle CORS (it's a straightforward solution, and
I'm rather surprised it isn't discussed more often). This change
has completely eliminated all costs related to web scraping.
Here's the Tech Stack: * Remix + HeroUI + Tailwind * Rust Backend
in Axum * Authentication with OTP email and Google social auth (via
openidconnect) * Sqlite running on the same VPS as the API service
* $5/mo VPS * Cloudflare CDN * Cloudflare R2 for storage *
Zeptomail for emails (very cheap and reliable, highly recommend!) *
Simple Analytics:
https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/fontofweb.com * Logging:
Journalctl :) There are currently 275 websites in the database,
and I'm working on increasing this. Stats are available at:
https://api.fontofweb.com/stats. While the main site doesn't need
an extension, for more robust searching and to help with
Cloudflare-protected sites, there's a chrome extension available.
There's also a public API for domains that have already been
checked. For instance:
https://api.fontofweb.com/report?domain=apple.com&path=/. There's
also RSS feed I've got no idea why you would need this directly,
but I'm using it because Pinterest allows you to automatically
populate boards with an RSS. https://api.fontofweb.com/rss
Appreciate your thoughts and feedback
Author : sim04ful
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-05-31 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fontofweb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fontofweb.com)
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| nice this will be super useful.
| jasoncartwright wrote:
| Might want to consider upgrading that VPS for a couple of days
| sim04ful wrote:
| Haha, Just enabled an endpoint wide caching policy. Stale
| content, but should be a stopgap.
| dylan604 wrote:
| must be a backend person! they were so proud to tell us about
| eliminating the cost of the scraping, but totally forgot about
| the cost of the user facing part of it. /s
|
| it is hard to imagine how quickly "going viral" can swamp your
| system until you've been there, done that.
| craigkilgo wrote:
| hug of death?
| sim04ful wrote:
| Oops seems like, enabled caching in the meantime. All the
| requests were hitting origin...thankfully I had cloudflare
| already doing the routing.
| andelink wrote:
| The searching for usage of fonts is a useful feature. But for
| identifying fonts on specific websites, I find the browser dev
| tools to be more than sufficient. There is a "fonts" tab that
| lists all the fonts in use and their attributes like weight, any
| variable axis, etc.
| sim04ful wrote:
| Variable Axis and other attributes are pretty feasible now, I'm
| already parsing the metadata for font tables values to dedup
| font files, so extending it should be pretty straight-forward.
|
| I'll investigate.
| nicoburns wrote:
| If you're not already using it, the read-fonts and skrifa
| crates from https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations can
| parse variable font data (as well as pretty much anything
| else you might want out of an opentype font).
| sim04ful wrote:
| Currently using the fonttools crate, but i'll look into
| this, appreciate.
| dfee wrote:
| Hey! That looks like the stack I'm working with! You just seem
| further :)
|
| Totally meta, and I appreciate FOW (cool!) but I'm pretty
| interested in your learnings building and deploying with this
| stack!
|
| Congrats on launch!
| user_7832 wrote:
| Excellent website! I manually still "collect" fonts in a text
| document using a font finder extension. I couldn't make out but
| is there a way to:
|
| a. add any website you find that has a good font/paring,
| optionally with comparisons? (For example polestar's Unica77 is
| nice, I remember coming across NB International somewhere which
| is similar in some ways but nicer)
|
| b. maintain one's "own" list of websites with good font/pairings?
| sim04ful wrote:
| Yup, you can currently bookmark a website by clicking the
| button at the right side of the search bar, and also add it to
| a collection you create.
|
| Here's my bookmarks as an example: https://fontofweb.com/2 And
| one of my collections: https://fontofweb.com/2/serif-heavy-
| sites
| sim04ful wrote:
| I'll note down the font comparison feature, there might be
| something to it indeed.
| khalilosman123 wrote:
| nice
| vinnymac wrote:
| Small piece of advice you should be debouncing your primary input
| at the very least, especially because you insert an entry into
| the browser history for every character typed (consider only
| doing that on submit). Plus if any calls are made to the network
| in response to a key press you'd add unnecessary pressure.
|
| Presently trying to navigate back to the comments from your site
| after typing out a domain required far more effort than
| navigating backward a couple times.
| sim04ful wrote:
| I'll fix that thanks
| sim04ful wrote:
| Hey guys, seems the influx of traffic has resulted in some
| unforeseen circumstances; i'm still trying to figure out what's
| going wrong.
|
| Edit - Fixed, Cloudflare wanted some money :)
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(page generated 2025-05-31 23:00 UTC)