Where do I get a font file?

The font is the one design decision visible on every single page of your project. That is why you can put your own in: one file, uploaded once, and AdenAI builds with it from the next ticket on.

This article walks the whole way. Why we want a file, where you find one, how to pick it, how to download it and what happens afterwards.

Why a file and not a link

Most websites out there load their font from somebody else's server when the page opens. That is convenient and has two catches.

• Every one of your visitors gets reported there. For the browser to fetch the font, it sends the visitor's IP address to that service. The visitor did not decide that, cannot see it, and you have no control over it.
• Your site depends on somebody else. If the service is disrupted, overloaded or blocked in some country, your site looks wrong there. For a small thing you could just as well deliver yourself.

So AdenAI never fetches a font from an outside service. Not as the main font, not as an addition, not even "just this one". Your font file goes into your project and is served from there, from the same address as your site.

This is not a setting somebody can flip, it is how it is built. It applies to us too: the preview your design profile shows you of your font also comes out of our own delivery, not from a font service.

Where to find a font

Free fonts. The largest collection is the Google Fonts catalogue at fonts.google.com. That sounds like a contradiction now, but it is not: downloading these fonts and putting them into your project is allowed. The problem is only the fetching at runtime, not the font. Almost all of them are under a free licence and may be used commercially too.

Bought fonts. From a type foundry or a reseller. Look for the web licence, often called "webfont". It is usually separate from the print licence, and only it permits use on a website. You will generally be given ready-made .woff2 files.

What you already have. If an agency once made or bought you a house font, the files are usually in your brand materials. Ask for them before you go looking for something new: a site that matches your business cards is worth more than a prettier font that is not yours.

How to choose one

• Legibility beats character. A font that delights in a heading can be tiring in body text. Read a whole line at normal size, not just the name in the catalogue.
• One is almost always enough. Two is the maximum, and then with a clear job each: one for headings, one for the text. From three on, a page feels restless without anybody being able to say why.
• Check the characters you really need. Umlauts, the German sharp s, the euro sign, German quotation marks. Some fonts do not bring them along. After you upload, we show you, see the character table.
• Few strong sizes beat many small gradations. That is more a matter for your ticket than for choosing the font, but it decides more about the impression than the font itself does.

Downloading: the easiest way

For a font from the Google catalogue there is a small free site with exactly this one purpose: the google-webfonts-helper at gwfh.mranftl.com/fonts. It hands you the files to take away instead of offering you a line to fetch them at runtime.

The steps, in case the site changes one day:

1. Type the font into the search field and click it.
2. Under charset tick latin. If you need eastern European characters such as ł, ș or ő, add latin-ext. No more than that: every charset makes the file larger.
3. Under style pick the cut you want to store, usually regular or 400.
4. Further down, Download files. You get a ZIP file.
5. Unpack the ZIP. Inside are files with names like inter-v13-latin-regular.woff2. Exactly one of them is what you upload to us.

Going through fonts.google.com itself works too: there is a download button there and you get .ttf files. We accept those, they are simply two to three times the size of .woff2.

Which format

Extension	When
.woff2	First choice. Packed hardest, loads fastest, every browser can read it.
.woff	The predecessor. Works too, just larger.
.ttf, .otf	What you often get when you buy, or from your agency. Works, but the largest file.

We do not accept more than 2 MB. A normal font for Latin is well below that, usually between 20 and 60 KB as .woff2. If your file is much larger, it almost certainly contains charsets you will never need.

Uploading

1. Open the project, then Design in the sidebar on the left.
2. Go to the Schrift (Font) section and click Schriftdatei auswählen (Choose font file). If a font is already stored there, the button says Andere Schriftdatei hochladen (Upload a different font file).
3. At the bottom, Design-Profil speichern (Save design profile).

You do not need to know the font's name. We read it out of the file and show it to you afterwards. There is deliberately no field for it any more: it was a question whose answer was already in the file.

The character table

Right after you pick the file, before you even press Design-Profil speichern, a small preview shows you upper and lower case, umlauts, digits and a sample sentence in several sizes, so you can see straight away whether it was the right file.

After saving, your font sits below the upload, and in full:

• every character once through. Upper and lower case letters, umlauts and the sharp s, digits, punctuation, quotation marks, special characters.
• the characters that are easily confused. Capital I, lower case l and the digit 1 side by side, likewise O, zero and Ø, or the digit 5 next to a capital S. In a row from A to Z nobody notices, only side by side do you see whether the font keeps them apart.
• a real sentence in five sizes, from heading down to footnote.

Take your time with it before you keep it. Three things are worth a look:

• If a single character steps out of line, it is missing from your file. We then show it in our font as a stand-in, and exactly the same will happen on your finished page. Usually it hits the sharp s, the euro sign or the German quotation marks.
• If a capital I gets confused with a 1, or a 5 with an S, you would otherwise only notice in a phone number or a house number on your finished page, and by then it is everywhere.
• The smallest line. If it is a strain here, it will be a strain on your site too, and that is where the small print goes.

The reason for the table is uncomfortably simple: a wrong pick of font otherwise only shows up on the finished page. And by then it is everywhere.

What AdenAI does with it

From the next ticket on, AdenAI puts the file into your project, wires it up there and sets a system font behind it as a fallback, so that your text is already there in the half second before it loads. The font is stored as one setting in the project rather than written into every page separately. If you want to swap it later, it is that one place again.

Pages already built stay as they are until the next ticket touches them. The design profile applies from the next ticket on, not retroactively.

If you have no file

Then there is nothing more for you to do. AdenAI picks a suitable default font itself, entirely without third parties, the same fonts that are available to us anyway, none that gets fetched from an outside service at runtime. There is deliberately no field for describing one in words: it was a question AdenAI can answer just as well itself.

And it puts the chosen font into your project just as locally. The rule above applies to fonts that do not come from you as well.

Swapping and removing

• Swapping: just upload a different file. The old one is replaced.
• Removing: tick the box Diese Schrift beim Speichern entfernen (Remove this font on save) under the character table and save. After that AdenAI picks one itself again.

Neither changes anything about what is already built. It applies from the next ticket on.

The licence question, briefly

Check once whether your font may be used on a website. With the free fonts from the Google catalogue that is the normal case. With a bought font it is in your licence, and sometimes there is a limit there for visitors per month. We do not check that for you, and we cannot: all we have is the file, not your receipt.

What else you set down once instead of writing it into every ticket is under Describing what you have in mind.