fontaine

fontaine

Automatic font fallback based on font metrics

•  Changelog
•  Online playground

Features

• Reduces CLS by using local font fallbacks with crafted font metrics.
• Generates font metrics and overrides automatically.
• ️ Pure CSS, zero runtime overhead.

On the playground project, enabling/disabling fontaine makes the following difference rendering /, with no customisation required:

	Before	After
CLS	0.24	0.054
Performance	92	100

Installation

With pnpm

pnpm add -D fontaine

Or, with npm

npm install -D fontaine

Or, with yarn

yarn add -D fontaine

Usage

import { FontaineTransform } from 'fontaine'

// Astro config - astro.config.mjs
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config'

const options = {
  // You can specify fallbacks as an array (applies to all fonts)
  fallbacks: ['BlinkMacSystemFont', 'Segoe UI', 'Helvetica Neue', 'Arial', 'Noto Sans'],

  // Or as an object to configure specific fallbacks per font family
  // fallbacks: {
  //   Poppins: ['Helvetica Neue'],
  //   'JetBrains Mono': ['Courier New']
  // },

  // You may need to resolve assets like `/fonts/Roboto.woff2` to a particular directory
  resolvePath: id => `file:///path/to/public/dir${id}`,
  // fallbackName: (originalName) => `${name} fallback`
  // sourcemap: false
  // skipFontFaceGeneration: (fallbackName) => fallbackName === 'Roboto fallback'
}

// Vite
export default {
  plugins: [FontaineTransform.vite(options)]
}

// Next.js
export default {
  webpack(config) {
    config.plugins = config.plugins || []
    config.plugins.push(FontaineTransform.webpack(options))
    return config
  },
}

// Docusaurus plugin - to be provided to the plugins option of docusaurus.config.js
// n.b. you'll likely need to require fontaine rather than importing it
const fontaine = require('fontaine')

function fontainePlugin(_context, _options) {
  return {
    name: 'fontaine-plugin',
    configureWebpack(_config, _isServer) {
      return {
        plugins: [
          fontaine.FontaineTransform.webpack(options),
        ],
      }
    },
  }
}

// Gatsby config - gatsby-node.js
const { FontaineTransform } = require('fontaine')

exports.onCreateWebpackConfig = ({ stage, actions, getConfig }) => {
  const config = getConfig()
  config.plugins.push(FontaineTransform.webpack(options))
  actions.replaceWebpackConfig(config)
}

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [],
  vite: {
    plugins: [
      FontaineTransform.vite({
        fallbacks: ['Arial'],
        resolvePath: id => new URL(`./public${id}`, import.meta.url), // id is the font src value in the CSS
      }),
    ],
  },
})

Note If you are using Nuxt, check out nuxt-font-metrics which uses fontaine under the hood.

If your custom font is used through the mechanism of CSS variables, you'll need to make a tweak to your CSS variables to give fontaine a helping hand. Docusaurus is an example of this, it uses the --ifm-font-family-base variable to reference a custom font. In order that fontaine can connect the variable with the font, we need to add a {Name of Font} fallback suffix to that variable. What does this look like? Well imagine we were using the custom font Poppins which is referenced from the --ifm-font-family-base variable, we'd make the following adjustment:

:root {
  /* ... */
-  --ifm-font-family-base: 'Poppins';
+  --ifm-font-family-base: 'Poppins', 'Poppins fallback';

Behind the scenes, there is a 'Poppins fallback' @font-face rule that has been created by fontaine. By manually adding this fallback font family to our CSS variable, we make our site use the fallback @font-face rule with the correct font metrics that fontaine generates.

Using Sass, Less or Stylus

The bundler plugin runs before your preprocessor, so it only sees the raw source of files your bundler treats as modules. If your @font-face rules live in a Sass partial, are generated by a mixin, or are pulled in with a Sass @import, fontaine never sees them: Sass inlines all of that before the bundler does.

For these setups, use the PostCSS plugin instead. It runs over fully-compiled CSS, so @font-face rules and font-family values are already plain CSS by the time fontaine reads them.

// postcss.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    require('fontaine/postcss')({
      fallbacks: ['BlinkMacSystemFont', 'Segoe UI', 'Helvetica Neue', 'Arial', 'Noto Sans'],
    }),
    // ...any other plugins, such as autoprefixer or cssnano
  ],
}

It accepts the same fallbacks, categoryFallbacks, resolvePath, skipFontFaceGeneration and fallbackName options as the bundler plugin. Do not use both plugins at once.

A couple of things worth checking in a webpack setup:

• Enable source maps on sass-loader. Sass does not rebase the URLs it inlines, so fontaine uses the source map to work out which stylesheet a src URL was written relative to. Without it, relative font paths are resolved against the entrypoint and metrics cannot be read.
• Set importLoaders on css-loader (2 for postcss-loader + sass-loader) if you import CSS that contains @font-face rules, such as Fontsource packages. Otherwise css-loader resolves those imports without running them through postcss-loader, and fontaine never sees them.

Because a font-family declaration and the @font-face rule it refers to may end up in different stylesheets, the PostCSS plugin appends a fallback to every non-generic font-family it finds, whether or not it generated the matching @font-face rule itself. A fallback family with no @font-face rule is ignored by the browser.

Category-Aware Fallbacks

Fontaine automatically selects appropriate fallback fonts based on font categories (serif, sans-serif, monospace, etc.) when using object-based fallback configuration.

const options = {
  // Use an empty object to enable automatic category-based fallbacks
  fallbacks: {},

  // Or customize specific categories while keeping defaults for others
  categoryFallbacks: {
    'serif': ['Georgia', 'Times New Roman'],
    'sans-serif': ['Arial', 'Helvetica'],
    // monospace, display, and handwriting categories use defaults
  }
}

Default Category Fallbacks

• sans-serif: BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Helvetica Neue, Arial, Noto Sans
• serif: Times New Roman, Georgia, Noto Serif
• monospace: Courier New, Roboto Mono, Noto Sans Mono
• display & handwriting: Same as sans-serif

Note: These presets are available programmatically via DEFAULT_CATEGORY_FALLBACKS and can be used with the resolveCategoryFallbacks helper function for advanced use cases. Both are exported from the fontaine package and shared across related packages (e.g., fontless) to ensure consistent fallback behavior.

Fallback Priority

1. Array format (fallbacks: ['Arial']) - Uses specified fonts for all families (legacy behavior)
2. Per-family override (fallbacks: { Poppins: ['Arial'] }) - Uses specified fonts for that family
3. Category-based - When a family isn't specified, uses the appropriate category preset
4. Global default - Falls back to sans-serif preset if no category is detected

Example:

{
  fallbacks: {
    // Specific override for Poppins
    'Poppins': ['Arial'],
    // Other sans-serif fonts will use the sans-serif preset
    // Serif fonts will use the serif preset automatically
  },
  categoryFallbacks: {
    // Customize the serif preset
    'serif': ['Georgia']
  }
}

How it works

fontaine will scan your @font-face rules and generate fallback rules with the correct metrics. For example:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Roboto';
  font-display: swap;
  src: url('/fonts/Roboto.woff2') format('woff2'), url('/fonts/Roboto.woff')
      format('woff');
  font-weight: 700;
}
/* This additional font-face declaration will be added to your CSS. */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Roboto fallback';
  src: local('BlinkMacSystemFont'), local('Segoe UI'), local('Helvetica Neue'),
      local('Arial'), local('Noto Sans');
  ascent-override: 92.7734375%;
  descent-override: 24.4140625%;
  line-gap-override: 0%;
}

Then, whenever you use font-family: 'Roboto', fontaine will add the fallback to the font-family:

:root {
  font-family: 'Roboto';
  /* This becomes */
  font-family: 'Roboto', 'Roboto fallback';
}

Development

• Clone this repository
• Enable Corepack using corepack enable (use npm i -g corepack for Node.js < 16.10)
• Install dependencies using pnpm install
• Run interactive tests using pnpm dev; launch a vite server using source code with pnpm demo:dev

Credits

This would not have been possible without:

• amazing tooling and generated metrics from capsizecss
• suggestion and algorithm from Katie Hempenius & Kara Erickson on the Google Aurora team - see notes on calculating font metric overrides
• package name suggestion from @clemcode

License

Made with

Published under MIT License.