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Dynamic subsetting & web font serving

  1. Adobe Fonts User Guide
  2. Introduction
    1. System and subscription requirements
    2. Browser and OS support
    3. Add fonts on your computer
    4. Add fonts to your website
    5. Add fonts on CC Mobile
  3. Font licensing
    1. Font licensing
    2. Manage your account
    3. Licensing for Creative Cloud for enterprise customers
    4. Adding font licenses to your account
    5. Removing fonts from the subscription library
    6. Adobe Fonts not available to Adobe IDs registered in China
    7. Why aren't these fonts included in my Creative Cloud subscription?
    8. Morisawa font removal September 2021
  4. Getting and using fonts
    1. Using Adobe Fonts in Creative Cloud apps
    2. Manage your fonts
    3. Resolve missing fonts in desktop applications
    4. Using fonts in InDesign
    5. Fonts and typography
    6. Using web fonts in HTML5 Canvas documents
    7. Using fonts in InCopy
    8. How to use fonts in Adobe Muse
    9. Using web fonts in Muse
    10. Packaging font files
    11. Troubleshooting guide: Adding fonts
    12. Added fonts aren't showing to font menu
    13. "Unable to add one or more fonts" or "A font with the same name is already installed"
    14. What happens when a font I'm using is updated by the foundry?
  5. Web design and development
    1. Add fonts to your website
    2. Troubleshooting guide: Adding fonts to a website
    3. Using web fonts in HTML email or newsletters
    4. Using web fonts with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
    5. CSS selectors
    6. Customize web font performance with font-display settings
    7. Embed codes
    8. Dynamic subsetting & web font serving
    9. Font events
    10. Why are my web fonts from use.typekit.net?
    11. Site can't connect to use.typekit.net
    12. Using web fonts with CodePen
    13. Browser and OS support
    14. Domains
    15. Using web fonts when developing locally
    16. Content security policy
    17. Printing web fonts
  6. Language support and OpenType features
    1. Language support and subsetting
    2. Using OpenType features
    3. Syntax for OpenType features in CSS
  7. Font technology
    1. OpenType-SVG color fonts
    2. Ten Mincho: important points on updating from Version 1.000

Adobe developed dynamic subsetting to accommodate East Asian web font serving. The large size of East Asian fonts — well over 10,000 glyphs in most cases — otherwise makes it unrealistic to load these fonts on a website without significantly impacting the load time.

The dynamic subsetting watches for any change to the Document Object Model (DOM)— such as a news feed or a comments section — and then requests any new characters that need to be added to the subset. This way, instead of downloading an entirely new font, the font loading simply requests the additional glyphs and performs the update right in the browser.

Creating a new web project

When you create a web project with one of these fonts, the Dynamic Subsetting character set option is selected automatically.

Adding fonts to an existing web project

Because dynamic subsetting is required to serve these fonts, you can only add them to an existing web project if it already uses dynamic subsetting. The web project menu will indicate which projects you can choose, or you can choose to create a new web project.

Why do I see 404 errors from dynamic font serving in my web browser?

It is normal to see some 404 errors with dynamic web font serving.

The dynamic font loading looks at the characters loaded into the page and checks to see if the font subset already exists for them on use.typekit.net, to speed up the font loading. If that subset doesn't exist yet, a 404 is returned. It is then created and the subsequent request to the same font subset is successful (200).

A 404 is only a concern if you see more than one on the same primer request, as it would indicate an issue with the subset augmentation. 

 

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