Convert WOFF2 to TTF

It is a delivery container, not a font format in the sense an operating system uses the word. Windows, macOS and Linux install sfnt files — TTF and OTF — and none of them has a handler for the compressed web wrapper, so double-clicking a .woff2 does nothing useful on any of them.

Unwrapping it is not a workaround or a downgrade. The WOFF2 was made from an sfnt font, and the conversion produces that font again: same outlines, same character map, same metrics, same feature tables. What comes out is the file that was always inside.

A font holds one of two kinds of curve. Quadratic curves live in a glyf table and belong to TrueType; cubic PostScript curves live in a CFF table and belong to OpenType. Both fit in a WOFF2, and the extension of the web file tells you nothing about which is inside.

So the converter looks. If the font holds CFF outlines and TTF was requested, it stops and says so — "this font holds PostScript (CFF) outlines, so unwrapping it produces an OTF rather than a TTF" — rather than writing a file whose extension misdescribes its contents. That message is not an error in your file; it is the answer to which target you should have picked, and OTF installs just as readily.

On Windows, double-click the file and choose Install, or drag it into the Fonts panel in Settings. Installing for every user needs administrator rights; installing for yourself does not and is usually enough. On macOS, double-click and let Font Book add it. On Linux, drop it into a fonts directory inside your home folder and refresh the cache.

One rule applies everywhere: applications read the font list when they launch. A font installed while your word processor, browser or design tool is already open will not appear in its menu until that program is restarted, and a great deal of confusion is spent on exactly that.

Web fonts are almost always subset, because trimming a typeface to the characters a site actually sets is where nearly all the page-weight saving comes from. A file prepared for an English-language site commonly contains basic Latin, a few punctuation marks and nothing else.

The unwrapped TTF inherits that exactly. Type a name with an accent, a euro sign or a Greek letter and you will get a blank rectangle, because the glyph is not in the file and never was. This is the single biggest difference between an unwrapped web font and the desktop release it came from, and it is the reason to look for the original before settling for this.

Applications show the family name stored in the font’s own name table, not the filename. Preparation tools routinely rewrite that name — a kit generator will happily stamp something like "brandsans-webfont" into the file — so the typeface turns up in the menu under a name nobody recognises.

It is cosmetic, and it can be corrected in a font editor if you have to live with the font for a while. It matters more when two files claim the same family name, which is how a document ends up switching between two subtly different cuts depending on which was installed last.

Once installed, the TTF behaves like any other desktop font: it appears in the font menus of word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools and image editors, and it can be used at any size. Nothing about having come from a web font limits it.

The caveats are the ordinary ones. Sharing a document that uses it means the recipient needs the font too, or the layout will reflow into a substitute — embedding it in the file, where the application supports that at all, is itself a licensing question. Web-only design tools that run in a browser generally will not accept a locally installed font at all; they have their own upload mechanism, and that is another distribution of the file.

Every web font is a downloadable file, because that is how a browser renders it. So the fact that you have a copy proves nothing about whether you may use it, and the ease of the conversion is not evidence that it is permitted.

Commercial web licences are typically issued for a named domain and a band of monthly page views, and they do not extend to installing the typeface on a designer’s machine — that is the desktop licence, sold separately. Fonts under the SIL Open Font License are the clean case: they may be converted, installed and redistributed provided they are not sold on their own and reserved names are not reused. If the typeface matters to you, identifying it and obtaining it properly costs less than the argument later.

TrueType fonts can carry hinting — a small program per glyph telling the renderer how to shift the outline at small sizes so stems land on whole pixels. Those instructions travel through the WOFF2 wrapper untouched, so the unwrapped TTF has whatever the original had.

Whether that is anything depends on the font. Hinting is a substantial manual effort, plenty of modern releases carry little of it, and some subsetters strip it to save bytes. macOS ignores hinting entirely and high-density screens make it close to invisible, so if the font looks thin or uneven it will be on a Windows machine at small sizes — and it is a property of the file rather than of the conversion.

The work is done by fontTools on our server, because there is no browser build of it. The file travels over an encrypted connection, is converted in an isolated environment, and the working directory is deleted as soon as the job finishes. The free tier is 25 MB per file and 100 server conversions a day, and a batch of up to 100 fonts comes back as one ZIP.

Two things it will not do. It will not turn PostScript outlines into TrueType ones — that is redrawing every glyph rather than repacking a container, and a half-correct version produces a font that looks right and spaces wrongly. And it will not read a file that is not a font: a stylesheet or an HTML error page saved with a .woff2 extension is reported as unreadable rather than converted into nonsense.