Using web inspector and ChatGPT to download paid fonts

Font websites often charge exorbitant amounts of money for their fonts. If you’re making money on whatever project you’re using, you should probably pay their fee, but otherwise you should be able to download it for free. This post will explain how to use free web tools to download fonts.

First, go to the webpage that you can download the font at. Then open up the web inspector/developer tools ( cmd + alt + i on Mac) and go to the network tab. Then sort by fonts. You should now get a list of fonts.

Then, right click on any font, right click > copy value > copy as cURL.

Now, you have a cURL request copied. This request will download a file if it is properly executed. The entire request seems to be important, as if the User-Agent and other parts of the http request don’t have the correct value, the request is denied. The request currently looks something like
curl 'https://www.wtypefoundry.com/media/pages/typefaces/nutmeg/fonts/c11a9e0433-1602529683/nutmeg-thinitalic.woff2' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0' -H 'Accept: application/font-woff2;q=1.0,application/font-woff;q=0.9,/;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' -H 'Accept-Encoding: identity' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Referer: https://www.wtypefoundry.com/media/pages/typefaces/nutmeg/4bd88fd3b3-1694238422/fontface.css' -H 'Cookie: kirby_session=e393e138c5a533a5eadb7709d60d2cf47331d977%2B1702940699.b1a7b07a6536faf9bec1.d3708d0e590e5d98b4a78a533b6948cb043f99aa5393662a9091999287763c80; _ga_NDXYC496JW=GS1.1.1702933499.1.1.1702934520.44.0.0; _ga=GA1.2.1510795876.1702933500; _gid=GA1.2.470667468.1702933500; _gat_gtag_UA_147571570_1=1' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: font' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin' -H 'TE: trailers'

Now, go to ChatGPT and paste this in and ask it to format the request in a way that downloads the file. All this does is add a --output '${filename}.woff2', but if you aren’t familiar with modifying cURL requests, having it format it for you could be convenient.

Go to your terminal and paste it in!

Now you have your font downloaded! You can do this as many times as you need to to get all your weights and then use either an online tool like cloudconvert (probably not secure) or this python code which uses brotli and fonttools to convert woff2 files to otf so you can install them for use with apps.