A hidden collection is a font collection that exists in your admin and keeps serving its webfonts, but is left out of everywhere a customer browses your catalog. Tick Hidden? on a collection’s Settings tab to hide it. Reach for it when a family isn’t ready to release, has been retired, or only ever exists to be used as a webfont on your own site rather than sold.
Hiding a collection
Open the collection, switch to the Settings tab, and tick Hidden?. From then on the collection drops out of every surface a customer sees:
- The catalog index – both the directory the demo template renders and the Store Modal’s Browse page – skips it.
- Its product page returns a not-found unless you’re previewing it as an admin.
- The GraphQL API omits it from the
fontCollectionslisting and won’t return it by slug unless you’re previewing as an admin.
Hiding a superfamily hides everything under it – its child families drop out of the same surfaces even if they aren’t individually marked hidden.11The catalog filter excludes a collection whenever either it or its parent is hidden.
Hiding is its own mechanism, separate from password-protecting a collection or scheduling an article to publish in the future – each of those works differently. Hidden? simply takes the collection out of view.
Webfonts stay available
Hiding a collection doesn’t take its webfonts offline. The webfont CSS and the .woff2 and .woff files keep being served from Fontdue’s CDN regardless of the Hidden? setting.22Only the catalog listings and product pages check the hidden flag – the webfont and CSS endpoints don’t.
That’s what makes hidden collections useful for a typeface you want to use but not sell. Upload your interface font as its own collection, mark it hidden, and reference its webfont on your site – it loads like any other Fontdue webfont while staying out of your catalog and Store Modal.
Previewing hidden collections
When you’re logged into your Fontdue admin, both the demo template and any script-tag site show an admin toolbar with a Preview hidden fonts checkbox. Tick it and hidden collections appear – their product pages render and they show up in the catalog index – so you can preview an unreleased family on your live site before anyone else can. Leave it unchecked and you see exactly what the public sees.33Previewing is explicit: the toolbar tells Fontdue to include hidden collections for your session only while the box is checked, so a logged-in admin browsing normally no longer reveals hidden fonts by accident.
A site built with React or Next.js gives you the same checkbox, but needs a little wiring first: it fetches its catalog on its own server with no admin session attached, so the preview signal has to be forwarded from the toolbar through your server. Admin preview walks through that setup.