(this post is regularly updated)

Google’s Font Directory and API for web fonts could have a transformative effect on how we read the web. The only problem is, Google has made it very difficult to download all of the actual font files.

Web designers must be free to experiment with these new fonts, to sketch, comp and get to know these typefaces in browser and non-browser applications. This is why I’m providing this archive.

The archive contains the most recent font files pulled from Google’s open source Web Fonts Directory project. All licenses, metadata and author credits are included.

* File size is shown in base-10 to match the OS X Lion’s Finder, please make sure the entire file has completely downloaded before expanding the archive. Archive is now served from Amazon S3. (No one told me there’s a free tier!) Windows users will need something like 7-zip (free) to unpack the archive.

If you agree Google has made it too difficult to download the fonts, please star this issue: Zip archive for non-technical users

Technical details

Creating the archive is semi-automatic, the commands are listed below. You should have a Mercurial clone of the Google Web Fonts directory as described here.

hg pull --update
tar -zvcf googlewebfonts.tgz -X googlefontexclude.txt googlefontdirectory

To reduce the size of the archive (it’s currently 998.7 MB!), files matching the following patterns in googlefontexclude.txt file will be excluded:

.hg*
md5sum
*.ff
*.log
*.menu
*.menu2
*.png
.DS_Store

# skip non-font directories
designers/
src/
tools/
Sources/
sources/
src_old/
archive/

# skip build files (I think?)
*.*latin
*.*ext
*.arabic
*.hebrew
*.japanese
*.thai
*.cyrillic
*.nam
*.afm

[the original post has been archived.]