How to be notified once a web font has loaded

Question

Google's Web Fonts API offers a way to define callback functions to be executed if a font has finished loading, or couldn't be loaded etc. Is there a way to achieve something similar using CSS3 web fonts (@font-face)?

Answer 1

2015 Update

Chrome 35+ and Firefox 41+ implement the CSS font loading API (MDN, W3C). Call document.fonts to get a FontFaceSet object, which has a few useful APIs for detecting the load status of fonts:

• check(fontSpec) - returns whether all fonts in the given font list have been loaded and are available. The fontSpec uses the CSS shorthand syntax for fonts.
  Example: document.fonts.check('bold 16px Roboto'); // true or false
• document.fonts.ready - returns a Promise indicating that font loading and layout operations are done.
  Example: document.fonts.ready.then(function () { /*... all fonts loaded...*/ });

Here's a snippet showing these APIs, plus document.fonts.onloadingdone, which offers extra information about the font faces.

alert('Roboto loaded? ' + document.fonts.check('1em Roboto'));  // false

document.fonts.ready.then(function () {
  alert('All fonts in use by visible text have loaded.');
   alert('Roboto loaded? ' + document.fonts.check('1em Roboto'));  // true
});

document.fonts.onloadingdone = function (fontFaceSetEvent) {
   alert('onloadingdone we have ' + fontFaceSetEvent.fontfaces.length + ' font faces loaded');
};

<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<p style="font-family: Roboto">
  We need some text using the font, for the font to be loaded.
  So far one font face was loaded.
  Let's add some <strong>strong</strong> text to trigger loading the second one,
    with weight: 700.
</p>

IE 11 doesn't support the API. Look at available polyfills or support libraries if you need to support IE:

• Web Font Loader - developed by Google and Adobe
• FontFaceOnload - lighter, similar approach to Web Font Loader
• FontLoader - polyfill