The Complete PDF Catalogue of Google fonts is now updated to May 2018!

Over 160 pages of Google Font goodness in a single, ready-to-print PDF catalog. And great for browsing offline (or in airplane mode)!

Thank you very much for putting the time and effort into your Google Fonts catalog. It’s a valuable document; I’m pleased to have purchased it.
(Chris Garland, Xeno Design) 

Google fonts are useful, because they can be embedded in websites, and are free to use.

What makes them less useful is that it is hard to browse through them to see what’s on offer.

So I downloaded all the fonts in a single zip package which I found on Github.com. Thanks to the folks who did that part of the job.

Then I prepared an InDesign file with 1000 lines of “The quick brown fox…”, and I wrote a script to apply a different Google font to each line.

The tricky part was to apply Google fonts only. Now, there’s no simple way that I can see of knowing whether a particular font is a Google font – certainly not via ExtendScript. I have 1000+ other fonts installed on my machine, and obviously this catalogue is meant to be Google fonts only. Also, I didn’t want to delete all the other fonts installed currently on my machine, and I don’t use a font manager.

The answer I came up with was to put all the fonts in a folder called GoogleFonts, and put that folder in InDesign’s font folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts on my machine).

Now, in the InDesign scripting DOM, each font has a Location object, which is the path to the font. At this stage it became a simple matter of checking the origins of each font, and using it only if it originated in the GoogleFonts folder.

Here’s the script for those who are interested:

t = app.selection[0].parentStory;
ps = t.paragraphs;
f = app.fonts;
c = 0;
for (i = 0; i < f.length-1; i++){
    aFont = f[i];
    myLoc = aFont.location.toString();
    if (myLoc.indexOf("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Common Files\\Adobe\\Fonts\\GoogleFonts") < 0) continue;
    $.writeln(i);
    fn = aFont.fullName;
    p = ps[c];
    p.appliedFont = aFont;
    p.insertionPoints[0].contents = fn;
    c++;
}

The result was satisfactory: An InDesign document with a complete list of Google fonts.

NEW: By popular request, version 3 of the Catalogue is now grouped according to language, and within each language group, by category (serif, sans-serif, handwriting, etc.) Each language group contains all fonts that support that language, so fonts that support multiple languages will appear in each group, making it convenient and easy to know your options. A clickable Contents page is included (as are PDF bookmarks) to make it easy to jump to each language.

Grab your copy of the Complete Google Font Catalogue now!

If you need the Complete PDF Catalog of Google Fonts designed differently, arranged in different groups, or including different information, please feel free to contact us.