'NextJS: Loading Font from Database

I'm using NextJS along with Tailwind CSS.

In my app, users can select a theme that includes different color schemes along with a pre-selected list of fonts. They can choose a font that they will like for the app.

These are only Google Fonts.

I'm not sure what's the best way to load a font based on the font name received from the database. I can load the data from the database in serverSideProps, but then how can I load the font before render so that there is no screen flicker. Can you please help?

UPDATE

As of now, I've done the following:

In tailwind.config.js, I've extended the theme with different fonts that are available.

theme: { fontFamily: { inter: ['Inter', 'sans-serif'], cal: ["Cal Sans", "Inter", "sans-serif"], arima:['Arima Madurai','cursive'], opensans:['Open Sans', 'sans-serif'], } }
I've created a stylesheet for each font, which is stored in public folder at this location:

/fonts/opensans/stylesheet.css

/fonts/cal/stylesheet.css

/fonts/inter/stylesheet.css

/fonts/arima/stylesheet.css

These stylesheets contain the font. An example below:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Cal Sans";
  src: url("CalSans-SemiBold.woff2") format("woff2"),
    url("CalSans-SemiBold.woff") format("woff");
  font-weight: 600;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

On the page (say pages/index.js), I load the user's preferences using serverSideProps and pass it to a Layout component. This layout component has the head which is created through next/head. Let's call the font prop received from server as themeFont.

Let's say the user's preference is Cal Sans, and the user's preference is stored in the database as value cal. So, themeFont value will be cal.

In the head, I load the related stylesheet as follows:

<Head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href={`/fonts/${themeFont}/stylesheet.css`}></link>
</Head>

This will load the /fonts/cal/stylesheet.css and the required font. No other font is loaded. Then I can use it in my components with font-cal because it has been defined in tailwind.config.css

It works fine. I still see a flicker, maybe because of the font-display:swap, or maybe it is because of some other reason. But I still feel this is not the optimal solution and this could be done in a better way.

Looking for help in this.

Solution 1:^[1]

Two ideas:

Fontsources maintains a complete repository of Google Fonts as NPM packages. You should be able to dynamically import the font you need as long as its corresponding NPM package is installed.

https://fontsource.org/docs/getting-started

Then you should be able to dynamically import the corresponding font as soon as you know what the font is. I don't know if the font would flicker here.

await import `@fontsource/${fontName}`;

This assumes you know fontName will be a valid Google Font name, or you'd need a try/catch for it.

Another approach is to fetch the font information on the server (if you're using Next.js you could do this with getServerSideProps, then use a custom <Head> element to point to the corresponding CSS file on fonts.googleapis.com and load that as part of the <Head> before other content renders (or at least as it's in the process of doing so.)

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Solution 1	Shea Hunter Belsky

'NextJS: Loading Font from Database

Solution 1:[1]

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Solution 1:^[1]