Update: Well, that was kind of a waste of time.

It turns out Google did make the fonts available–sort of. Buried in the sixth paragraph of the announcement on the Google Code blog is a link to the Google Code Font Directory project, which is hosting the original source files for all the fonts.

There’s no single-archive download yet, but I filed an issue asking for one. (Please star that so it gets noticed.) Until there’s a single official download, I decided to host a zipped clone of the repository. I plan on removing this whenever Google adds a downloadable archive to the source repository, which will hopefully be soon.

Google Web Fonts Download (17.8 MB)

I also decided to nuke my Google Font Extractor repository since it’s irresponsible to promote an incomplete distribution of the fonts.

It wasn’t a complete waste of time, Python makes me happy. For the curious, here’s my extractor script.

Here’s the original post:

Google’s new Font Directory and API could have a transformative effect on how the web looks. Some of the fonts look great, though after all these years anything would be a refreshing break from the monotony of Arial, Times, Georgia and Verdana.

However, web designers must be able to experiment in non-browser applications. For whatever reason, Google has made it very difficult to download the actual font files [see above...]. So, I wrote this little script:

Google Font Extractor

The script will download the full set of open source Google Fonts to your computer.

Of course, until MobileSafari (and Android’s browser) supports TrueType-flavored @font-face declarations, which I kind of expect they will, the whole endeavor will be kind of hamstrung.

So I’ve got a big update ready to go for iTransmogrify!. Except there’s a problem with Google Code.

Google Code doesn’t allow downloads to be renamed or deleted after they’re 2 days old or have 50+ downloads. That nugget of critical information is buried deep in their FAQ.

I posted this in Google Code Support, Rename or replace download and commented on issue 417, Need a stable link to the latest version of a download. A ‘latest version’ link on Google Code would solve this completely, but it’s been almost four months since they tagged the issue, so who knows when or if that feature will ever exist.

I’m not expecting any help from Google, so I’m considering the following two options:

1. Link files directly from svn trunk.
2. Set up externally-hosted http redirect.

Neither is ideal and both would require users to update their bookmarks or miss out on updates. Additionally the main script file would be outside of stats collection, so no one would know how many times iTransmogrify has been used, when I hit publish on this post, that number was just under 279,000 times.

My solution

After a day of thinking about it and discussing things with a few people, I’ve decided to go with a locally-hosted redirect for the main JavaScript file. Going forward I’ll just manually update the redirect to point to the latest version. This is an acceptable outcome for an imperfect situation.

The update will unfortunately require action on the users’ part, something I had intended never to happen: Users will need to update the bookmarklet. From here forward, all updates will just happen, as I’d planned from the beginning.

Once this update is known to be working, I will modify the graphics seen by the old script file to announce the changes. Hopefully that last step will get most everyone moved to the newer bookmarklet.

For the record:

Hanukkah : 8,470,000 hits.
Chanukah : 3,390,000 hits.
Hanukah : 862,000 hits.
Hannukah : 677,000 hits.
Chanuka : 335,000 hits.
Chanukkah : 274,000 hits.
Hanuka : 192,000 hits.
Channukah : 128,000 hits.
Chanukka : 116,000 hits.*
Hanukka : 86,300 hits.
Hannuka : 51,400 hits.
Hannukkah : 37,300 hits.
Channuka : 33,600 hits.
Xanuka : 992 hits.
Hannukka : 686 hits.
Channukkah : 508 hits.
Channukka : 489 hits.*
Chanuqa : 25 hits.

With the exception of a few wildcards, there are 16 different spellings, based on four phonetic variations:

• The word starts with “H” or “Ch”
• Second consonant is “nn” or “n”
• Third consonant is “kk” or “k”
• The word ends with “ah” or “a”

I think I must have grown up with “Chanukah”, because it look most right to me. At Lila’s pre-school Hanukkah party, there were three different spellings within 10 feet of one another. In the interest of ending the ridiculousness of the dozens of spellings, I’m going forward with “Hanukkah” which is the preferred spelling used by the Library of Congress. At least it’s always the same in Hebrew: חֲנֻכָּה

This would be a fun thing to make dynamic, even chart over time. If only I had time… Jeremy Blachman did the same Hanukkah spelling thing in 2004, interesting to see how much bigger the Google indexes have grown in 12 months.

See results for other years:  2008, 2007, 2006.

* These seem to be popular spellings in German.