Performance Concerns - WOFF2

[robneu]

First of all, thanks a ton for creating and maintaining this project. It's great to see someone offering up an open source alternative to Google Fonts. We've been discussing switching to Brick as our default web font for our commercial WordPress themes and some issues have been raised about performance when compared with Google Fonts.

I realize Google is probably always going to have the upper hand here due to their massive delivery network, but are there any plans to add support for WOFF2?

You can see the discussion we're having on our starter theme repository here if you're interested: https://github.com/FlagshipWP/compass/issues/26

[alfredxing]

Thanks for considering Brick! We don't currently have plans to support WOFF2 due to browser compatibility (it would also nearly double the size of the repository).

Looking at the discussion in your repo, there are a few remarks I'd like to add:

• Google Fonts has improved a lot since Brick was released. I don't know if this was because of Brick or just something Google has been working on, but I noticed as well that Google is now serving ligatures and kerning by default. Combined with Chrome's (for Windows) DirectWrite update, Google Fonts now look significantly better than it did before. Personally, I still think Brick wins on rendering, but it does incur a cost in terms of font size.
• Brick fonts are larger not only because of compression method; it's because the fonts we serve maintain the exact same character set as was distributed by the designer/foundry. If Google's size is significantly less, it definitely means that they're subsetting the fonts in some way. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but with a WordPress theme it might help to have a large character set so you can support more languages. I believe you can specify character set with Google as well, but the font size would increase with it.