Google Font not working on Safari

Question

I\'m working on making my site look the same under Safari and Chrome. In Chrome it looks exactly how I want it to. The major problem is that Google Font doesn\'t seem to be

Answer 1

A 2018 update

I've had this problem in the past and I've had to resort to the option of providing more font file formats. I was a bit surprised to encounter it again in 2018. But it turned out that my problem was not with file-formats but simply with not requesting and specifying the correct font weights.

If we don't customize the URL for requesting this font from Google our link tag will look like this:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro" rel="stylesheet">

Let's have a look at what is inside that requested URL. It's going to contain several font-face rules looking something like this:

/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Source Sans Pro';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: local('Source Sans Pro Regular'), local('SourceSansPro-Regular'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/sourcesanspro/v11/6xK3dSBYKcSV-LCoeQqfX1RYOo3qOK7l.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}

Notice the font-weight attribute. It's specified as 400 which is a "normal" weighted font. Some browsers are able to take this font and turn it into a bold and still look half way decent. This is called "faux bold". It's never going to look as good as a hand crafted bold font though. And on some browsers, notably mobile Safari, it's going to fall down flat and look horrible.

The remedy is to request and specify the actual font weight variants you want to use. In my case it looks like this:

This will produce the following link tag:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,700&amp;subset=latin-ext" rel="stylesheet">

If you look at the contents of that URL you'll find that there are now entries for font-face rules font-weight: 700 in there.

Now if I want to use the bold version of this font for my h1 tags I'll use the following CSS.

h1 {
    font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif;
    font-weight: 700;
}

Most browsers will automatically set h1 as font-weight: bold. If I want to take advantage of that default setting I have to provide my own font-face rules. I can do this by simply duplicating the font-face rules supplied by Google, exchaging font-face: 700 for font-face: bold and putting those changed rules in my own css.

So this rule:

/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Source Sans Pro';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 700;
  src: local('Source Sans Pro Bold'), local('SourceSansPro-Bold'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/sourcesanspro/v11/6xKydSBYKcSV-LCoeQqfX1RYOo3ig4vwlxdu.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}

Would become this:

/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Source Sans Pro';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: bold;
  src: local('Source Sans Pro Bold'), local('SourceSansPro-Bold'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/sourcesanspro/v11/6xKydSBYKcSV-LCoeQqfX1RYOo3ig4vwlxdu.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}

Now an h1 tags with font-family: 'Source Sans Pro' will be using the correct font variant. If you want a more in depth read check out this 2012 A List Apart article.