Use a google font and include only [A-Z] and '&'

Question

Is there a way to use a google font and have it load only [A-Z] and the & ampersand character?

I would like to do this to reduce size and improve load time, since I will only use basic latin numbers and letters.

I can host the font myself if I must and it is legal to manipulate the font package, but am not sure if self-hosting is necessary and how to manipulate google's font package.

I have specified A-Z like this:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

but specifying & is troublesome. Both of these don't work:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=ABC&amp;' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=ABC&' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Answer 1

There is no way to specify character ranges when including google fonts. The only way to do it is to specify each character like this:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Answer 2

You can include special characters by url-encoding their UTF-8 representation.

& (U+0026) is 26 in UTF-8, so your url should have:

&text=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ%26

Here's a handy tool for this: http://www.url-encode-decode.com/