Method to create local font server so that browser gets fonts from locally installed fonts.

[stan]

Fedora provides lots of fonts, and I have lots of them installed.  I
would like the browser to use them instead of going out on the web to
find fonts for pages it is rendering.  A nice to have feature would be a
mapping of common fonts to substitute fonts if they aren't available.
For instance, if a web page calls for Times-Roman, and I don't have that
installed, the server substitutes a reasonable alternative.  This would
be mapped to things like fonts.googleapis.com so that I would still get
a reasonable font when the browser wants to call there, but gets the
local font server instead.

Is there such a thing already in Fedora?  If there isn't, would it be
easy to create such a thing with existing tools?

As an alternative, could I compile the local fonts into firefox so that
they are directly available?

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 10:19:33 -0700
stan via users wrote:

>  Is there such a thing already in Fedora? 
If you can find the actual name of the web font,
most of them can be downloaded and installed
locally, just like any other font from places
like https://fonts.google.com/ (they aren't
packaged in rpms though so you need to do extra
work to keep them up to date).

Considering all the css and ads and images on
every web page, I doubt the font download is
measurable:-).

[stan]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 14:49:55 -0400
Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Considering all the css and ads and images on
>  every web page, I doubt the font download is
>  measurable:-). 
It isn't the download time so much as the tracking.  With browser
signature, it is like a trail of bread crumbs to call fonts.blah on
every page.  Just like the capcha, etc.

With scripting turned off for third party sites, a lot of the overhead
is gone.  My position is that if they want to push the ads with their
content, I'll see them, but I won't let them use my computer to fetch
ads for them, or track me so they can sell the information.