# Chapter 6. Fonts

**URL:** <https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761>\
**Category:** 2019 Web Almanac\
**Created:** [October 30, 2019, 11:58pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761 "2019-10-30T23:58:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rviscomi](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discuss.httparchive.org/rviscomi/32/835_2.png) [@rviscomi](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/rviscomi)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2019, 11:58pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761/1 "2019-10-30T23:58:57Z")

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Share your questions, comments, and ideas about the Fonts chapter of the Web Almanac…

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**Author:** ![stewf](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discuss.httparchive.org/stewf/32/1693_2.png) [@stewf](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/stewf)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2019, 8:41am UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761/2 "2019-11-21T08:41:06Z")

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I’m amazed to see such high usage (1.8%) of variable fonts! Is there a way to access the dataset to see which sites are using them?

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**Author:** ![lars\_schwarz](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discuss.httparchive.org/lars_schwarz/32/480_2.png) [@lars\_schwarz](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/lars_schwarz)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2019, 11:38pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761/3 "2019-11-21T23:38:48Z")

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@stewf The majority of this sites actually use Oswald (94.5%) and Comfortaa (5.3%) followed by Markazi Text, Work Sans, Source Sans/Serif, Inter and 3 or 4 sites using others. I can share a Google Doc of all variable fonts from the Almanac results incl the page URL if you like?

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**Author:** ![lars\_schwarz](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discuss.httparchive.org/lars_schwarz/32/480_2.png) [@lars\_schwarz](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/lars_schwarz)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2019, 1:06pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761/4 "2019-11-22T13:06:40Z")

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It seems the “most popular typefaces” section is kinda inaccurate, simply because it’s aggregated on font-family name only.

According to your “ranking” for example FontAwesome is only on rank #11, even though my best guess would be it should be on #2.

Looking at the Almanac data there are 723 different font-family namings for FontAwesome alone, like

Timely\_FontAwesome  
FontAwesomeRegular  
sow-fontawesome  
FontAwesomeLight  
fontawesome-webfont  
FontAwesomePro  
FontAwesomePB  
FontAwesomeFull  
fontawesome fa-regular  
FontAwesome5FreeSolid  
FontAweSomeNew  
Fontawesome-solid  
FontAwesome5  
FontAwesome5 Brands  
FontAwesome-V5  
fontAwesome1  
fontawesome\_0  
FontAwesome5-regular

and so on.

To be more specific:

4,455,431 FontAwesome \< only this is taken into account  
67,703 fontawesome  
31,715 FontAwesomePro  
19,740 Timely\_FontAwesome  
19,271 fontawesome-webfont  
15,382 sow-fontawesome-free  
12,058 evo\_FontAwesome

… plus 716 alternate font-family names

I also noticed an issue with the function to retrieve font names in respective query, it also returns font names like

`"\FontAwesome\;src:url(//diyservicemanuals.com/wp-content/thesis/skins/sparkez/\fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot?v=4.0.3\);src:url(//diyservicemanuals.com/wp-content/thesis/skins/sparkez/\fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot?#iefix&v=4.0.3\) format(\embedded-opentype\), url(//diyservicemanuals.com/wp-content/thesis/skins/sparkez/\fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=4.0.3\) format(\woff\), url(//diyservicemanuals.com/wp-content/thesis/skins/sparkez/\fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf?v=4.0.3\) format(\truetype\), url(//diyservicemanuals.com/wp-content/thesis/skins/sparkez/\fonts/fontawesome-webfont.svg?v=4.0.3#fontawesomeregular\) format(\svg\)"`

or multiple names like

`"微軟正黑體,新細明體, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, FontAwesome"`

Guess this is related to the original response data and not the function itself though.

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**Author:** ![lars\_schwarz](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/discuss.httparchive.org/lars_schwarz/32/480_2.png) [@lars\_schwarz](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/lars_schwarz)\
**Post date:** [November 24, 2019, 12:54pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/chapter-6-fonts/1761/5 "2019-11-24T12:54:48Z")

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There’s another issue with the “most popular typefaces” btw., possibly affecting other sections, too. Some requests attributed to Open Sans are not actually requests related to the actual page they had been attributed to, but due to Cloudflare’s anti-bot protection.

For example: [http://www.madereros.com/](http://www.madereros.com/) doesn’t use any web font at all, even though according to the Almanac data it does, but instead your crawler saw Cloudflare’s anti-bot page here (which uses Open Sans).