Material Design Icons font files on Google Fonts do not match font files in this repo

[Gitoffthelawn]

Describe the bug

Google Fonts does not offer the same files as the source repo for the Material Design Icons. I reported the issue there as well.

To Reproduce

STR:

1. Download Material Design Icons from Google Fonts website. If you can't figure out how to do this, don't feel bad. Please see the UX issue I reported here.
2. Download Material Design Icons from the source repo for the Material Design Icons.
3. Extract the contents of the downloaded zip files.
4. Compare the version numbers of the font files. Notice they are the same (e.g. v1.017 for MaterialIcons-Regular.ttf).
5. Notice that the file sizes of the fonts aren't even close (e.g. 55% increase in size for the font file distributed via Google Fonts for MaterialIcons-Regular.ttf than distributed via the source repo).

Expected behavior

Fonts distributed via Google Fonts website to match source files.

Goal

Hopefully this issue report (and the corresponding one for Google Fonts) will help determine why the files are different, and if the files distributed by one of the repos need to be changed.

[charann29]

i want to work on it @Gitoffthelawn

[tphinney]

It is odd that there are different file sizes. That said, the old Material Icons fonts haven’t been actively developed in about 4-5 years now and are deprecated in favor of Material Symbols.

Also, as noted in the linked issue, the file size difference is 44 bytes in a 350K file, which is a 0.01% difference, not a 55% size increase.

[Gitoffthelawn]

@tphinney Thanks for your comments. Yes, Material Icons fonts are technically deprecated by Google, but are still in use by many websites (possibly literally millions of sites) as well as by applications on multiple platforms.

Regarding the size of that file... when I checked almost a half a year ago, to my my knowledge, it was 55% (unless I somehow compared the wrong files). The files delivered now could possibly be different. I haven't looked at the files since 2024 November 3. Of course, the important message is that the files should be identical and have no difference in size or contents.

[Gitoffthelawn]

@charann29 Are you still interested in working on it? Thanks.

[tphinney]

Regarding the size of that file... when I checked almost a half a year ago, to my my knowledge, it was 55% (unless I somehow compared the wrong files). The files delivered now could possibly be different. I haven't looked at the files since 2024 November 3. Of course, the important message is that the files should be identical and have no difference in size or contents.

When a Google Fonts contractor responded on 2024 November 5, two days after your post (a year and a half ago), with the same font versions you reported on, they found it to be a 0.01% difference and not a 55% difference. It was not that something has changed massively in the past year and a half, but that they couldn’t replicate your complaint at the time.

When I check the current versions, I note that they are generally OTF and not TTF, and the file sizes are identical.

I suspect that the original differences stem from the files being generated in OTF and converted to TTF with marginal differences.

@charann29 Are you still interested in working on it? Thanks.

I have no idea who they are, so I am pretty sure they are not in a position to help.