Typography may never be the same

Google's new collection of high quality open source web fonts are now in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API is now available.

For a long time, the web has lagged behind print and even other electronic media in typography. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters often resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Google has been working with many talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory.

With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts installed on most computers. The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes, requiring just 2 lines of code to be included in your web page.

The Google Font API offers a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text.

In addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.