Proper MIME type for .woff2 fonts

293
votes

Today I updated Font Awesome package to 4.3.0 and noticed that woff2 font was added. That file is linked in CSS so I need to configure nginx to serve woff2 files properly.

Currently I have this block in nginx config for fonts:

location ~* \.(otf|eot|woff|ttf)$ {
    types     {font/opentype otf;}
    types     {application/vnd.ms-fontobject eot;}
    types     {font/truetype ttf;}
    types     {application/font-woff woff;}
}

What is proper mime type for woff2 fonts?

4
fontsmime-typeswoffwoff2
Here's how to cache woff2 files in Apache: <IfModule mod_mime.c> AddType font/woff2 woff2 and <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType font/woff2 "access plus 1 month". (Closing tags and newlines omitted.) – Chloe

4 Answers

463
votes

In IIS you can declare the mime type for WOFF2 font files by adding the following to your project's web.config:

<system.webServer>
  <staticContent>
    <remove fileExtension=".woff2" />
    <mimeMap fileExtension=".woff2" mimeType="font/woff2" />
  </staticContent>
</system.webServer>

Update: The mime type may be changing according to the latest W3C Editor's Draft WOFF2 spec. See Appendix A: Internet Media Type Registration section 6.5. WOFF 2.0 which states the latest proposed format is font/woff2

219
votes

font/woff2

For nginx add the following to the mime.types file:

font/woff2 woff2;

Old Answer

The mime type (sometime written as mimetype) for WOFF2 fonts has been proposed as application/font-woff2.

Also, if you refer to the spec (http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF2/spec/) you will see that font/woff2 is being discussed. I suspect that the filal mime type for all fonts will eventually be the more logical font/* (font/ttf, font/woff2 etc)...

N.B. WOFF2 is still in 'Working Draft' status -- not yet adopted officially.

39
votes

Apache

In Apache, you can add the woff2 mime type via your .htaccess file as stated by this link.

AddType  application/font-woff2  .woff2

IIS

In IIS, simply add the following mimeMap tag into your web.config file inside the staticContent tag.

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <staticContent>
      <mimeMap fileExtension=".woff2" mimeType="application/font-woff2" />
17
votes

http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF2/spec/#IMT

It seem that w3c switched it to font/woff2

I see there is some discussion about the proper mime type. In the link we read:

This document defines a top-level MIME type "font" ...

... the officially defined IANA subtypes such as "application/font-woff" ...

The members of the W3C WebFonts WG believe the use of "application" top-level type is not ideal.

and later

6.5. WOFF 2.0

    Type name:

        font
    Subtype name:

        woff2

So proposition from W3C differs from IANA.

We can see that it also differs from woff type: http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF/spec/#IMT where we read:

Type name:

    application
Subtype name:

    font-woff

which is

application/font-woff

http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF/#appendix-b