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Show HN: Fontofweb – Discover Fonts Used on a Website or Websites Using Font(s) (fontofweb.com)
1 point by sim04ful 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
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

There’s a premium subscription available as well, for some extra perks like previewing fonts and downloading them.

Appreciate your thoughts and feedback.



I'm using the Firefox Addon Fontanello for the same usage.




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