HELP: Custom web fonts; how to shrink file size

[Guest]

Hey there!

I know how to embed custom fonts into my website and I like using them a lot. Right now, I use a single font (Galmuri 9) throughout my entire website.

However, every single time someone clicks on my site they download a whole 4MB .ttf font! This is too much for me, especially if some people have to connect over a mobile network or from an old computer, and just generally I dislike bloat. I don't want to hotlink from a different website because that feels mean to them, and it also is a point of failure that I don't want to have to think about.

Is there any way to reduce effective file size with custom fonts for performance reasons, especially if I want to use multiple on the same site?

[shevek]

I saw that you never got a reply to this issue. Is this still a problem or did you find a solution yet?

From my research I gather that small file sizes for fonts is kind of a tradeoff at times with not supporting specific characters or older browsers.

I found people save on font file size by only using the WOFF formats (not ttf etc.) which has the downside of not supporting older browsers, but has its own compression via Brotli and is therefore smaller.  Others use FontSquirrel Webfont generator on Expert to edit what the font files entail and remove glyphs; this would already reduce the file size on your end.
If you don't want to edit the file itself and don't mind the file size on your end, you might be interested in setting specifications in the CSS (Unicode range subsetting for example) so it arrives smaller for the end user, but I guess that depends on if your font even has all these characters. If it is already "barebones" so to speak, there might not be much to remove or subset.