Embeding Google fonts locally in Europe - Urgent!

Backlight 4 & 5 Support
#1

Dear Backlighters - I need some help to solve this urgent problem.

I feel ashamed for our country regarding this, but in Europe it has become illegal to use external links to US embeding fonts or other helpful stuff like forms, analytics maps etc.

I am already victim of a lawyer who uses this law to force money from me.

I have 2 websites made with BL1 and BL3 which both use Google Fonts embeded externally. (not yet attacked - but there are several lawyers crawling the net right now).
Can you help me with an explanation how to change to embedding locally the fonts using BL?
Thanks in advance!
Bobby

In the BL1 Version Website I found in a page template:
under tab “Typography”
“Google Fonts Statement (optional)”
I got the link to the Google font server in this field…
My plan is to substitute this link (in all page-templates)…
but I am still not sure…

refering to a local folder containing the woff and woff2 fonts?

Prevent backlight from contacting fontawesome.com
#2

You’ll need to use phplugins and custom css and upload fonts to your site.
The phplugins file and code will be different for your BL1 site compared to BL3.

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#3

Thank you Rod,
really appreciate your help.

It looks like I managed to solve the problem with my attempt from above.
In the field in the template (Typograpy) I implemented a link to a css-file that I had put in a folder in my root directory. In this directory I have put the font files beside the css-file.
It looks like solved now… fonts show up properly and the “bad” link to google doesn’t exist anymore.

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#4

Yikes. That sounds like a pain.

I second Rod’s suggestion. But yes, the steps to follow would be to:

  • Download whatever desired fonts from Google Fonts.
  • Upload those fonts into the backlight/custom folder, or a subfolder therein.
  • In a custom stylesheet, do the CSS to reference those fonts, using the font-face property.
  • In your Backlight template, reference the font-face by name wherever you’d like to use it.

Rather than including your CSS in the Typography field, I do recommend that you use the Custom Stylesheet feature, as we’ve built it to be used for exactly this purpose.

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#5

This being the case, I would also be wary of using Font Awesome icons. Sounds like I maybe need to reevaluate iconography in the Pangolin modules, and maybe make some changes.

Unfortunately, this is a bad week for me to do so, as I’m moving to another state at the end of the month, but I’ll try to take a look at things soon and determine whether additional changes need to be made.

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#6

Hi Matt,
unfortunately this is not the only thing going wrong in Europe right now… and yes…it is painful.

Regarding your “native” “programmers choice” solution…
as someone who is not really into css…
what I understood:
pros of your solution:

  1. I do it once and can afterwards select the custom stylesheet in backlight itself.
  2. It is more easy to manage multiple fonts (which I do not need in the moment)
  3. anything else?
    cons:
  4. Rod said it is different in various versions… so makes it more difficult for me
  5. my solution is already working
  6. it is easy for my to have this standard folder containing fonts and css on all root-directories of my websites, even the one not managed with BL.

I don’t think we have to become over worried…
Mostly I think, well known widely spread usage of services from
google are interesting targets for attacks from these modern gangsters.
In the letter the say that their customer was feeling harmed by finding out that his/her IP could have been transferred to Google servers while surfing on my website…
but we know that this is a lie,… that my websites guest was a crawler instead.
This is not legal, but the only way to lift the deal to the desired rentability.
So this crawler is trained to search for this specific but widely used service from google and found them on thousands of websites from poor victims. Forums are full of these stories right now… it is a shame.

#7

The advantage is that Custom stylesheets are the supported feature, and something we’ll be able to troubleshoot going forward. I imagine you should be able to just copy-and-paste your CSS into a file at the appropriate location, then enable the relevant options in your template. Should be simple.

Yes, I agree the accusation sounds like bullshit. I’m sure it’s a troll lawyer trying to screw people.

As for Font Awesome, it’s a link to externally hosted resources. And that’s due to licensing; I am able to make my Font Awesome Pro license available to Backlight users, but I cannot redistribute the actual files (so would not be able to host them locally).

FWIW, Kookaburra does not include Font Awesome, and currently only links to one external asset (which I am making local in the next update). I will also make it a point going forward to make Kookaburra fully local, so it will always be a solid answer to this questions.

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