🦜 This guide aims to help people navigate the requirements and recommendations for contributing to Google Fonts. The contents covered here range from general knowledge to contextualize the what and why of some of the requirements as well as the specifics regarding technical aspects with some suggestions on how to comply with them. It covers different levels of information for both newcomers and more experienced contributors.
Therefore, this documentation is not meant to be read at once. If you are already familiar with some of the concepts, for example, some people are more empowered with the use of Github please you can skip some chapters and jump to the other bits that you may be looking for. The guidelines have been separated into small bits to facilitate the search of specific information that you would need at a specific stage of the font production.
If you are a newcomer and you want to contribute fonts to Google Fonts, whether commissioned or as a voluntary contribution, you should read the chapters marked with
start and must→. Additional resources are available under the learn label.
If you are an experienced user or are onboarding fonts to Google Fonts, the chapters marked with team and nerd are for you.
The guide also provides details on required documents, some of them as templates you could copy and paste into your repository, these are marked with the templ label.
Introduction: getting familiar with the basics
The most basic concepts, tools, or knowledge you will need to cover to begin contributing with Google Fonts.
The Upstream Repo: administrate your project files
To improve and facilitate the open collaboration as well as the publishing process, we require a specific structure for your files on the GitHub repository.