In order to use a custom font in a Rails 4 project, you can either put it under public folder (and configure the css path accordingly) or you can load it from assets folder.

First of all, I personally recommend that you read the assets pipeline entry . This will give you a fairly good idea on how to do it.

Nevertheless, given the two options here it goes:

Option 1 – load the font file from the public folder

1. Copy the font file to public/fonts/
2. configure your css file to load the needed path
   1. Add the following to your css file

     @font-face {
       font-family: 'VanCondensed';
       src:url("/fonts/VanCondensed-Regular.otf");
       font-weight: normal;
       font-style: normal;
     }
   

Option 2 – load the font from the assets folder

1. Copy the font file to app/assets/fonts/
2. Update your config file, so the project knows that it has to load the fonts folder
   1. config.assets.paths << Rails.root.join('app', 'assets', 'fonts')
3. configure your css file to load the needed path
   1. Change the css file extension to css.erb
   2. Add the following to your css file

     @font-face {
       font-family: 'VanCondensed';
       src:url("<%= asset_path('VanCondensed-Regular.otf') %>");
       font-weight: normal;
       font-style: normal;
     }
   

4. Restart your server