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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 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 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 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 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=/ 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 https://api.fontofweb.com/rss
Appreciate your thoughts and feedback
- TechDebtDevin 1y agonice this will be super useful.
- jasoncartwright 1y agoMight want to consider upgrading that VPS for a couple of days
- sim04ful 1y agoHaha, Just enabled an endpoint wide caching policy. Stale content, but should be a stopgap.
- dylan604 1y agomust 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 1y agohug of death?
- sim04ful 1y agoOops seems like, enabled caching in the meantime. All the requests were hitting origin...thankfully I had cloudflare already doing the routing.
- cank 1y ago[dead]
- andelink 1y agoThe 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.