Webpack "OTS parsing error" loading fonts - css

Question

My webpack config specifies that fonts should be loaded using url-loader, and when I try to view the page using Chrome I get the following error:
OTS parsing error: invalid version tag
Failed to decode downloaded font: [My local URL]
The relevant parts of my config look like this:
{
module: {
loaders: [
// ...
{
test: /\.scss$/,
loaders: ['style', 'css?sourceMap', 'autoprefixer', 'sass?sourceMap'],
},
{
test: /images\/.*\.(png|jpg|svg|gif)$/,
loader: 'url-loader?limit=10000&name="[name]-[hash].[ext]"',
},
{
test: /fonts\/.*\.(woff|woff2|eot|ttf|svg)$/,
loader: 'file-loader?name="[name]-[hash].[ext]"',
}
],
},
}
It doesn't happen in Safari, and I haven't tried Firefox.
In development I'm serving files through webpack-dev-server, in production they're written to disk and copied to S3; in both cases I get the same behaviour in Chrome.
This also happens to larger images (greater than the 10kB limit in the image loader config).

Answer 1

TL;DR Use absolute paths to your assets (including your complete hostname) by setting your output.publicPath to e.g. "http://example.com/assets/".
The problem
The problem is the way that URLs are resolved by Chrome when they're parsed from a dynamically loaded CSS blob.
When you load the page, the browser loads your Webpack bundle entry JavaScript file, which (when you're using the style-loader) also contains a Base64 encoded copy of your CSS, which gets loaded into the page.
This is what it looks like in Chrome DevTools
That's fine for all the images or fonts which are encoded into the CSS as data URIs (i.e. the content of the file is embedded in the CSS), but for assets referenced by URL, the browser has to find and fetch the file.
Now by default the file-loader (which url-loader delegates to for large files) will use relative URLs to reference assets - and that's the problem!
These are the URLs generated by file-loader by default - relative URLs
When you use relative URLs, Chrome will resolve them relative to the containing CSS file. Ordinarily that's fine, but in this case the containing file is at blob://... and any relative URLs are referenced the same way. The end result is that Chrome attempts to load them from the parent HTML file, and ends up trying to parse the HTML file as the content of the font, which obviously won't work.
The Solution
Force the file-loader to use absolute paths including the protocol ("http" or "https").
Change your webpack config to include something equivalent to:
{
output: {
publicPath: "http://localhost:8080/", // Development Server
// publicPath: "http://example.com/", // Production Server
}
}
Now the URLs that it generates will look like this:
Absolute URLs!
These URLs will be correctly parsed by Chrome and every other browser.
Using extract-text-webpack-plugin
It's worth noting that if you're extracting your CSS to a separate file, you won't have this problem because your CSS will be in a proper file and URLs will be correctly resolved.

Answer 2

For me the problem was my regex expression. The below did the trick to get bootstrap working:
{
test: /\.(woff|ttf|eot|svg)(\?v=[a-z0-9]\.[a-z0-9]\.[a-z0-9])?$/,
loader: 'url-loader?limit=100000'
},

Answer 3

As asnwered here by #mcortesi if you remove the sourceMaps from the css loader query the css will be built without use of blob and the data urls will be parsed fine

Answer 4

As with #user3006381 above, my issue was not just relative URLs but that webpack was placing the files as if they were javascript files. Their contents were all basically:
module.exports = __webpack_public_path__ + "7410dd7fd1616d9a61625679285ff5d4.eot";
in the fonts directory instead of the real fonts and the font files were in the output folder under hash codes. To fix this, I had to change the test on my url-loader (in my case my image processor) to not load the fonts folder. I still had to set output.publicPath in webpack.config.js as #will-madden notes in his excellent answer.

Answer 5

I experienced the same problem, but for different reasons.
After Will Madden's solution didn't help, I tried every alternative fix I could find via the Intertubes - also to no avail. Exploring further, I just happened to open up one of the font files at issue. The original content of the file had somehow been overwritten by Webpack to include some kind of configuration info, likely from previous tinkering with the file-loader. I replaced the corrupted files with the originals, and voilà, the errors disappeared (for both Chrome and Firefox).

Answer 6

I know this doesn't answer OPs exact question but I came here with the same symptom but a different cause:
I had the .scss files of Slick Slider included like this:
#import "../../../node_modules/slick-carousel/slick/slick.scss";
On closer inspection it turned out that the it was trying to load the font from an invalid location (<host>/assets/css/fonts/slick.woff), the way it was referenced from the stylesheet.
I ended up simply copying the /font/ to my assets/css/ and the issue was resolved for me.

Answer 7

Since you use url-loader:
The url-loader works like the file-loader, but can return a DataURL if the file is smaller than a byte limit.
So another solution to this problem would be making the limit higher enough that the font files are included as DataURL, for example to 100000 which are more or less 100Kb:
{
module: {
loaders: [
// ...
{
test: /\.scss$/,
loaders: ['style', 'css?sourceMap', 'autoprefixer', 'sass?sourceMap'],
},
{
test: /images\/.*\.(png|jpg|svg|gif)$/,
loader: 'url-loader?limit=10000&name="[name]-[hash].[ext]"',
},
{
test: /\.woff(\?v=\d+\.\d+\.\d+)?$/,
use: 'url-loader?limit=100000&mimetype=application/font-woff',
},
{
test: /\.woff2(\?v=\d+\.\d+\.\d+)?$/,
use: 'url-loader?limit=100000&mimetype=application/font-woff',
},
{
test: /\.ttf(\?v=\d+\.\d+\.\d+)?$/,
use: 'url-loader?limit=100000&mimetype=application/octet-stream',
},
{
test: /\.eot(\?v=\d+\.\d+\.\d+)?$/,
use: 'file-loader',
},
{
test: /\.svg(\?v=\d+\.\d+\.\d+)?$/,
use: 'url-loader?limit=100000&mimetype=image/svg+xml',
},
],
},
}
Allways taking into account on what the limit number represents:
Byte limit to inline files as Data URL
This way you don't need to specify the whole URL of the assets. Which can be difficult when you want Webpack to not only respond from localhost.
Just one last consideration, this configuration is NOT RECOMMENDED for production. This is just for development easiness.

Answer 8

The best and easiest method is to base64 encode the font file. And use it in font-face.
For encoding, go to the folder having the font-file and use the command in terminal:
base64 Roboto.ttf > basecodedtext.txt
You will get an output file named basecodedtext.txt. Open that file. Remove any white spaces in that.
Copy that code and add the following line to the CSS file:
#font-face {
font-family: "font-name";
src: url(data:application/x-font-woff;charset=utf-8;base64,<<paste your code here>>) format('woff');
}
Then you can use the font-family: "font-name" in your CSS.

Answer 9

I just had the same issue with Font Awesome. Turned out this was
caused by a problem with FTP. The file was uploaded as text (ASCII)
instead of binary, which corrupted the file. I simply changed my FTP
software to binary, re-uploaded the font files, and then it all
worked.
https://css-tricks.com/forums/topic/custom-fonts-returns-failed-to-decode-downloaded-font/
this helped me in the end
I had the same issue with FTP transferring files as text

Answer 10

If you're using Angular you need to check to make sure your
<base href="/">
tag comes before your style sheet bundle. I switched my code from this:
<script src="~/bundles/style.bundle.js"></script>
<base href="~/" />
to this:
<base href="~/" />
<script src="~/bundles/style.bundle.js"></script>
and the problem was fixed.
Thanks to this post for opening my eyes.

Answer 11

As of 2018,
use MiniCssExtractPlugin
for Webpack(> 4.0) will solve this problem.
https://github.com/webpack-contrib/mini-css-extract-plugin
Using extract-text-webpack-plugin in the accepted answer is NOT recommended for Webpack 4.0+.

Answer 12

The limit was the clue for my code, but I had to specify it like this:
use: [
{
loader: 'url-loader',
options: {
limit: 8192,
},
},
],

Answer 13

In my case adding following lines to lambda.js {my deployed is on AWS Lambda} fixed the issue.
'font/opentype',
'font/sfnt',
'font/ttf',
'font/woff',
'font/woff2'

Answer 14

Had same problem like #adam-mccormick and user3006381. I am using webpack5 and hot module.
My .eot or .woff files contained:
export default __webpack_public_path__ + "./fonts/montserrat-v24-latin-ext-regular.woff2";
and my webpack.config.js looked like:
modules.exports = {
//...
module: {
rules: [
//...
{
test: /\.(woff|woff2|eot|ttf|otf)$/i,
use: [{
loader: "file-loader",
options: {
name: './fonts/[name].[ext]',
}
}]
}
]
}
}
and this was my problem solution:
modules.exports = {
//...
module: {
rules: [
//...
{
test: /\.(woff|woff2|eot|ttf|otf)$/i,
type: 'asset/resource',
generator: {
filename: './fonts/[name].[ext]',
}
}
]
}
}