Subset a font online

Subset a font to only the characters a page uses. Enter the characters to keep and download a smaller TrueType font, made in your browser. No upload.

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What is font subsetting?

Subsetting removes the glyphs a page never shows and keeps only the characters you pick. A full font can hold thousands of glyphs for dozens of languages. A headline, a logo or a site in English needs only a small part of them.

How to subset a font

Drop a .ttf or .otf font above. Edit the list of characters to keep, or replace it with the exact text you need. Press Subset font. opentype.js reads the font in your browser, finds the glyph for each character and builds a new TrueType font with only those glyphs plus the required .notdef glyph. Download the smaller .ttf, then run it through TTF to WOFF2 for the smallest web font.

Why subset a font?

Web fonts are often among the largest files a page loads. Cutting a display or icon font down to the characters in use can make it much smaller, sometimes from hundreds of kilobytes to a few. Pages load faster and text appears sooner, which helps Largest Contentful Paint.

Choosing characters

The default set covers Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. For the smallest file, replace it with the exact text of a heading, or paste every character your interface uses. Remember accented letters for names and curly quotes if your text uses them.

What subsetting drops

The new font is written from the kept glyph outlines and a rebuilt character map. Kerning pairs, ligatures and other OpenType layout features from the original are not carried over, and neither is TrueType hinting. For body text where kerning matters, use a subsetting tool that keeps GSUB and GPOS tables, such as pyftsubset from fontTools.

Before you start

Input: TTF and OTF. Output: TTF. The settings appear before anything runs, so you can check them first. Your original file is never changed.

Archives and fonts can hold many files or complex tables. Look over the file names you get. Don't open programs you didn't expect, and keep the source until you have checked the output.

Keep the original until you have opened and checked the result. The work happens in this browser tab, so the size you can handle depends on your device's memory, your browser and the file itself.