Coding Oct 11, 2026
4 min read
Shrink variable webfonts by removing the axes you don’t use
Fonts were more than 90% of the bytes on a post here. Subsetting to Latin had already been done, since that is how Google Fonts serves them. The weight was in the variation data: an optical-size axis the page pins at one value and a weight range it uses a sixth of. Instancing both away cut the fonts by 73%.