Many users have created some amazing documents for use in HireHop, utilizing HTML5, JavaScript and CSS functionality.  For these documents users sometimes need a special font that they store on their server, however, sometimes the font doesn’t seem to work in the HireHop document.  The reason for this is because of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) restrictions in browsers.

Fonts Not Loading in Documents & Web Pages

Most web browsers do not allow cross-domain requests, this is because of the same origin security policy. The result is that sometimes when using web-fonts from another domain, this can cause errors and the font does not load in the web page (or HireHop documents). Basically, for security reasons, some files are being “flagged” as not being allowed to be used across different domains by the server that hosts them, so the following typical code might not seem to work:

<style type="text/css">
@font-face {
    font-family: "OpenSans";
    src: url("https://my_server.com/fonts/OpenSans.woff2") format("woff2");
}
html, body{
    font: normal 16px OpenSans, sans-serif;
}
</style>

The Solution

To fix cross-origin restrictions for your fonts, the response from remote server that hosts the font files must include the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in the font file.

If you’re using font services like Typekit or Google Fonts, or maybe content delivery networks like BootstrapCDN, CdnJS or JsDelivr to load your prefered fonts, you don’t need to do anything, because the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header is already sent in their response header.

Apache

To configure an Apache web server, put the following code into the httpd.conf or .htaccess file.

  1. Add the mime type headers on Apache:
    AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject    .eot
    AddType application/x-font-opentype      .otf
    AddType image/svg+xml                    .svg
    AddType application/x-font-ttf           .ttf
    AddType application/font-woff            .woff
    AddType application/font-woff2           .woff2
    
  2. Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) on Apache for the mime types:
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
      <FilesMatch ".(eot|otf|svg|ttf|woff|woff2?)$">
        Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
      </FilesMatch>
    </IfModule>
    

NGINX

To configure an NGINX web server, put the following code into the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or your custom /etc/nginx/conf.d/custom.conf file.

  1. Add the mime type headers on NGINX:
    application/vnd.ms-fontobject    eot;
    application/x-font-opentype      otf;
    image/svg+xml                    svg;
    application/x-font-ttf           ttf;
    application/font-woff            woff;
    application/font-woff2           woff2;
    
  2. Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) on NGINX for the mime types:
    location ~* .(eot|otf|svg|ttf|woff|woff2)$ {
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
    }
    

IIS

To configure the Microsoft IIS, add the following the code to the web.config system.webServer block.

  • Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) on IIS
    <system.webServer>
      <httpProtocol>
        <customHeaders>
          <add name="access-control-allow-origin" value="*" />
          <add name="access-control-allow-headers" value="content-type" />
        </customHeaders>
      </httpProtocol>
    </system.webServer>
    

PHP

If you can’t change the server settings, you can always use PHP to deliver the font file.

  • Use a server script file rather than a physical font file
    <style type="text/css">
    @font-face {
        font-family: 'OpenSans';
        src: url('https://my_server.com/fonts/OpenSans.php') format('woff2');
    }
    html, body{
        font: normal 16px OpenSans, sans-serif;
    }
    </style>
    
  • How to fix cross-domain @font-face issues with PHP
    <?php
    // fonts.php
    header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
    header('Content-Type: application/font-woff2');
    echo @file_get_contents('/fonts/OpenSans.woff2');
    ?>
    
Posted in API