Plugin Name

Absolutely. Fontsampler is free to use Open Source software developed by Johannes Neumeier of Underscore Type. You can use it for personal as well as commercial websites. A big portion of the initial development has been funded via an IndieGoGo campaign (see the About tab in the plugin) and you can support development by donating to the plugin development (there is a link in the plugin page sidebar).

Absolutely. You can enable and arrange each interface element for every Fontsampler. You can set custom styles and options for all Fontsamplers on your site, or customize them for each Fontsampler individually.

You can update site-wide settings for layout, features and styling that get applied to all Fontsamplers. All of those options can also be overwritten for each individual Fontsampler, so you can have more customized styling for some previews.

Currently only the WOFF format is supported, and support for WOFF2 will hopefully soon follow. Legacy webfont formats EOT and TTF are being phased out beginning with version 0.4.0.

Absolutely. You can display your fonts' names in any script you wish to, so you don't have to use PostScript names for your font display (your fonts do, however, need to have ASCII PostScript names in them to technically work). Right to left scripts are equally supported, and support for right to left scripts has been added to the backend as well.

The plugin is coded to best Wordpress standards. Using it with any theme or plugin should work. If you encounter any problems with a particular theme or plugin please post in the support forum.

You can use the shortcode anywhere on your Wordpress site, so adding it to the description fields of your e-commerce plugin (e.g. WooCommerce and the like) will let you display the Fontsampler there. For more advanced users / developers you can trigger the shortcode programmatically and pass in what font files to use dynamically.

That is possible, you only need to activate the corresponding user interface element and Fontsampler will automatically detect all available OpenType features from the provided webfont files. Using and testing locl features is implemented via a separate language dropdown.

Fontsampler works with PHP 7.0.0 or higher. PHP is free software and does not require any license other than the open source licenses shipped with it. Those versions of PHP are also required for security reasons aside from Fontsampler, so keeping those up to date is a good idea either way.

Fontsampler uses web font technology to render and display fonts. These font formats are designed for usability, not security. And as such, the web font files are loaded onto the users machines just like they would on any other website that uses web fonts. Fontsampler makes no attempt at scrambling or obfuscating the web fonts served. Tech savy users can download those web fonts and reverse engineer them into working Opentype files. If you are concerned about your intellectual property it is recommended to only use limited charset and feature demo web font files.

Fontsampler relies on the information in the uploaded webfont files. As such, it will extract font names, style names and weights from the files (even if you set a different display name), and the browser will use these attributes to switch the preview font. If you have fonts in the same Fontsampler that are not explicit the browser fails to switch them. Make sure font family names, weights and italic flags are set in your font editor when exporting the web fonts. Additionally, some special cases like stencil, outline etc. variants might need that you give them a distinct family name from the regular, e.g. "Myfont regular/bold/italic/etc." and "MyfontStencil regular/bold/italic/etc." - you can still overwrite their display name after uploading them.

The Github repository has more documentation about available PHP hooks and Javascript callbacks. For example you can dynamically trigger the shortcode and pass in fonts or react to the Fontsampler finishing to load. Overwriting Fontsampler specific CSS in a theme should be trivial and provide more options than the Backend user interface. You can also style specific instances by their class .fontsampler-interface.fontsampler-id-xxx. If you are missing a feature or hook, let me know in the support forum.