

Google Webfont Directory - adamhowell
http://code.google.com/webfonts

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Barnabas
Interesting, it appears to be serving @font-face fonts with browser-specific
stylesheets. Firefox gets a tag with src: local('name'), while IE doesn't.
More details here:
[http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/technical_consider...](http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/technical_considerations.html)

This server-side logic makes it more than just a font-face repository like I
initially assumed. If you feel like rolling your own and not using Google's,
you can easily download font-face kits from fontsquirrel.com.

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silvestrov
A very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and
the font, and can reuse them across _multiple websites_.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user
has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It
doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a
difference.

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truebosko
Took me one minute to implement. Amazing. The Droid Sans font looks great on
headers, using it already. Always wanted to use Typekit but too cheap to pay
the costs, this works for me.

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portman
Link? Would love to see it...

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truebosko
<http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Droid+Sans>

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endtime
I think he meant on your site...

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truebosko
Probably, it was for our work site and I don't really want to link ecommerce
sites here, don't think it's kosher.

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icefox
By using the link in your site you will give googles servers a nice log of as
many pages on your internal server as your users go to :)

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truebosko
What? So? The ecommerce site is public for any user .. don't see the issue :-)

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Periodic
I'm glad to see some more of the common pieces of the internet hosted more
centrally. There are issues with one company being in control of these things,
but we gain a lot of benefits by having standard fonts and libraries
available. These benefits include better caching and ease of patching.

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pyre
Having a centralized structure will help in pushing adoption, but I feel like
we should make sure that once we have acceptance, we don't become dependent.

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cb33
Sweet. Looks pretty easy to implement.
[http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.ht...](http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.html#Quick_Start)

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savrajsingh
It'll be awesome if google hosts non-romanized script fonts, too. Many sites
in other languages require you have a certain font on your machine.

Here's a good example of a font Google should add -- Saab, a Gurmukhi
(Punjabi) font. <http://guca.sourceforge.net/typography/fonts/saab/> (free,
gpl'd, unicode 4.0, opentype)

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mortenjorck
I think I found a bug. That is, a Safari bug that can be worked around by
other means. I tried using Cardo (only available as TrueType) on a site I'm
building, and it renders inconsistently in Safari (Mac), cutting off lines of
type at random heights.

This seems to be a TrueType bug in Safari that can be circumvented by using
OpenType or SVG, which I discovered can be easily prepared with this excellent
little tool: <http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator>

I ended up opting for my own @font-face linkage with the multiple formats
converted by the aforelinked, which seems to render much better across
browsers.

Shouldn't be hard for Google to implement something like this, though.

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WillyF
Any thoughts on why Google is doing this other than a perverse will to take
over the entire Internet?

My thought is that they're hoping this will encourage more text instead of
images as text. That helps them index more information and collect more data
on the whole web.

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Perceval
Microsoft (and Apple) did a similar thing back in 1996–7 with "core fonts for
the web" in which they tried to push a standard pack of fonts out to everyone
so that web designers could assume that end users would have certain key
fonts.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web>

It's not some big conspiracy, it's about making the web easier to use, easier
to read, and easier to design.

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garrickvanburen
(blatant self promotion) <http://kernest.com> supports iPhone/iPad and
categorizes fonts by character set (cyrillic, greek, etc) -
<http://kernest.com/subsets/>

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bryanh
Odd, just looking at the compatibility sheet and then my analytics says that
Google's Chrome is by far the worst offender in not supporting this. Chrome
sits at 15% of my sites traffic and about 75% of that is pre-4.249.4.

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jodrellblank
Another notch in the "soon every web page you visit will cause your browser to
talk to Google" spider's web.

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bryanh
They're already usually chatting somehow. Analytics. Adsense. Etc.

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jodrellblank
Exactly. It's happened so queitly and unremarked as well. It's the scope of
your "etc." which is growing.

Doubleclick ads, embedded youtube videos, centrally hosted frameworks such as
jQuery, embedded RSS feed aggregation, Google Charts / sparklines, Maps,
custom site search with autocomplete, Google Talk client, Picasa images,
Waves, iFramed Docs/Calendars...

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elblanco
Wondering how long till these show up in Google docs.

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orblivion
Wait, for all this, there are just 17 fonts in their directory? I mean,
appreciated of course, but is this all that helpful for a web developer?

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jcnnghm
Doesn't seem to work on the iPad.

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tptacek
Typekit doesn't work with iPhone-OS Webkit either (our designer put a bunch of
typekit goo on our site).

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drivebyacct
Google, usability! I should be able to go from a font page to your really nice
configuration page that lets me control it even more:
<http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview>

Dammit Google, why did I have to search my history for a link to this awesome
page. Sometimes, I swear people _ignore_ intuitive things that are just too
obvious.

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drivebyacct
Also, I find the use of the word "implement" on this page hilarious. It's
dropping the same font-face crap thats been in HTML5 for months into a
webpage. The __only __difference is that it's hosted by Google.

Then again, Twitter was abuzz with everyone freaking out about DnD in html5.
Guess if Google's not holding peoples' hands they might as well be useless. I
also saw a tweet where someone asked if the REST API would be available for
the iPhone. I facepalmed.

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drivebyacct
Right downmods because font-face, DnD and REST APIs are hard and new things.

