Google announced their new Font API yesterday, including a font directory and preview tool. They teamed up with TypeKit, to build and open source the WebFont Loader.
I quite like how they have done it. You just hotlink the CSS right from Google and then reference the font names in the CSS. It’s really easy — view source on this demo.
Why do this? Isn’t this just @font-face? Yep it is just @font-face, which you can do yourself without Google’s help. But there are advantages:
- Bandwidth savings (weight is on Google)
- Caching speed (same font used on multiple sites, browser cache kicks in)
- Speed in general (Google’s CDN is faster than your site)
Loading the extra CSS file is an extra HTTP Request though, but you could hotlink the font file instead. You may also want to download the font and create your own SVG version, because the Google stylesheets aren’t serving that up, and hence no support for iPhone/iPad.
So what is this WebFont Loader then? It’s a bit of JavaScript which handles the loading of fonts. It’s use is totally optional, but offers some advantages. For example, Firefox will display a font further down the font stack until an @font-face font is loaded, and then flip to the @font-face font when it is ready, causing reflow and general weirdness. It’s called FOUT (Flash of unstyled text). The WebFont Loader can help fight this — see Paul’s article on it.
Raph Levien is a type designer, and creator of the Inconsolata font. Raph also works on the Google Font API team. I caught up with him to ask him a few questions about all this…
*Chris: Google does a lot of cool stuff for people building websites, including some seriously bandwidth intensive things. For example, we can hotlink to JavaScript libraries hosted on Google’s CDN. The last thing I want to do is look a gift horse in the mouth, but I know it makes people wonder sometimes, what is in this for Google? Guaranteed this is going to make web fonts faster, so is it as simple as a faster web is good for Google? Or is there going to be analytic data captured that is useful to Google?
Raph: It’s all about making the web faster and richer for everybody. We’re not collecting any personal information for web font requests, and only aggregating the logs at a coarse level so we can keep track of performance and overall popularity of fonts.
One of the great things about this service, just like the AJAX libraries (such as our WebFont Loader), is that many different sites can link the fonts, and they’ll all share the browser cache – it’ll only trigger a network download for the first one.
*Chris: Should the worst happen, and the font API were to have a bit of downtime, what happens to sites using these fonts? Will the browser follow the font stack down and pick a fallback, or does something else happen?
Raph: Yes, it’ll use fallback fonts. It’s just CSS, so the designer gets full control over the font stack, and if you want more fine-grained control, you can use the WebFont Loader library as well – for example, you can trigger JavaScript code to make CSS changes when the font fails to load. We’re also going to be collaborating with all major browser vendors to improve the web font experience for users.
*Chris: It is pretty interesting to see a collaboration between your team and TypeKit. How that that come about?
Raph: TypeKit has been been blazing the trail to make web fonts available to a wide audience. We’ve known the team for a while (Jeff Veen used to work at Google, in fact), so it was natural to talk to them about what we’re doing. We think our collection of open source fonts is pretty good, but for a broader range of professionally designed fonts, we want to make it easy for people to upgrade. We’ve also been working with other major font vendors, including Ascender.
*Chris: A lot of free / open source fonts serve their creators as an advertisement for a more robust set of fonts that isn’t free. Do you see that as a hurdle for the Google Font Directory, in that could become a repository of intentionally limited fonts? Or will that kind of thing be curated out?
Raph: We’ve been getting a great response so far. People have all kinds of reasons for contributing open source fonts, and one is definitely to create more visibility and traffic for selling proprietary fonts. A lot of people just love creating fonts. Whatever the reasons, I’m confident we’ll see a nice, steady stream of high quality fonts. But there’ll always be more choice of top-quality fonts from professional foundries.
Thanks to Raph for the quick interview! Let me know what ya’ll think of this. I’m thinking it’s a pretty big win for web fonts, although I think (and hope, really) that all the best fonts will remain on paid services like TypeKit. Web fonts still have a way to come. Clearly there are still some problems on Windows, and if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Nice interview. However I have my doubts. Using this technique (which is great by the way) more and more sites are going to depend on Google. Could have a downside in my opinion.
With that attitude, will your sites/clients sites not suffer slower speeds as you load nice fonts, or suffer having to read a blog that only uses websafe fonts? Why should they suffer because you ‘have your doubts’?
I’d embrace it where it can make a difference to content.
It is so easy to use, that any competing method will have to be easer if not equally as easy, so its can only be a good thing.
or suffer having to read a blog that only uses websafe fonts
Suffer? All that pain and hardship having to read a blog rendered in Ariel, Verdana or Georgia!
Let’s face it, fancy fonts are for the designer and at least 95% of the users couldn’t care less (or notice the difference) what font is being used as long as they can read what’s written on the page.
‘Suffer’, It was a little tongue in cheek.
Your right, Verdana and Georgia were a step too far!
Ariel is enough!
Actually, “Arial” is enough (not The Little Mermaid). Sorry – couldn’t resist.
I have relied on Google links for jQuery in the past and have had it choke. But I think that the ability to embed unique fonts makes it worth it. Just make sure that your site looks decent in Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc…
I don’t have any big “doubts” — but I do agree that having more and more sites depend on Google is probably why this project was greenlit in the first place. More sites depending on Google just makes Google a more powerful entity in whatever abstract way that makes sense. And more power to them, they aren’t forcing us to do anything here.
right on. 100% agree.
The crazy thing is, Google has a veritable encyclopedia of free web content, from their AJAX libraries to the custom search tool, I’m all for it.
It baffles the mind how people can look at Google’s free services and shun the efforts.
How quickly we forget the days of AOL and the “closed” internet experience.
Free and open content is bang on. Thanks, Google!
This is just the start. Google can see the future before others. Sure, they are no forcing. They are always trying to evolve technologies to help others.
I welcome Google font api. According to speed, repository, standard …. it has much possibility.
I have concerns as well about depending solely on Google. Though it looks good in theory, I take issue with one organization controlling the flow of data. It’s convenient, but the conspiracy theorist in me is weary. The chance for Google to become a web monopoly has just increased, which could have adverse effects on innovation and competition. I know that is really extreme, but I am just a teensy-bit paranoid.
That said, the Font Directory is slightly limited at the moment. However, I see that growing with time. The only real advantage of using this over Cufon or Typekit (which is not free) is that it’s hosted on Google, so thinking on my part is brought down to manageable levels. I would like to see how the Font Directory expands.
“The chance for Google to become a web monopoly has just increased”
Not true at all. As he said, you declare a backup font and you’re set. If Google *were* to shut down tomorrow, fonts such as Arial, Garamond, etc. are still installed on computers. There’s no harm in using Google for this, just like using Google for jQuery. It speeds up your site.
It doesn’t really speed up your site, in the long run maybe but it’s still an extra HTTP request plus at least 2 domain lookups. That can be pretty extensive, which is why I decide to load jQuery and other combined scripts from my own server.
The fonts API needs a way to be used on your own server as well, maybe another tutorial on that Chris?
“…which could have adverse effects on innovation and competition.”
Okay, so i agree on the competition part, as to where we don’t want another IE scenario to happen ever again. As for the adverse effects on innovation: You actually just combined Google and adverse innovation in one sentence. Do i need to say more? To spare the comments, i actually feel like i have to, so: I think Google actually is a key motivator for web innovations. They invent a lot, optimize a lot and document the hell out of every single bracket they type in their source. I think calling Google a possible adverse on innovation is like saying we should take IE6 as a standard for developing our web applications.
“t’s all about making the web faster and richer for everybody.”
Google are so lovely.
Just great, finally more font type for web browsers with out breaking my back! This is huge
Owww this is interesting – will be good to see where this leads :)
Indeed. I’ve been apprehensive about trying out custom fonts on my sites. Think I’m gonna add one or two to my personal sites.
What do you think, bit of League Gothic and Chunk5? Probably not in the section and definitely don’t go together =O)
Another trick how to know more about internet users? :-)
Raph mentioned that they only parse the server logs at a “coarse level” to, for example, see how popular certain fonts are. I tend to believe that, in that you are just hotlinking CSS here, no technology is used to track visitor behavior or anything like that.
I know but no one knows… Like here in Czech Republic. Google was doing the pictures for their favourite Street View in Prague. But during this procedure they were secretly collecting data from unsecured WiFi networks everywhere in Prague, which is strongly illegal. In that case I stopped believing that Google is doing this new “awesome” services for better browsing experience…
And why the heck did you have unsecured WiFi networks?
Agree with Slobodan.
@Tomas Varil: You are loading a CSS-file (!). No way in hell to do anything other then returning content, not the other way arround (it ain’t javascript).
The only thing you could* be sending is your HTTP Headers (which Browser etc.) you use, which is public data anyway.
*I a say could, because if you’re a hypocrite you can (and should by all means) install every plugin there is you can find when Googling (!) on “http referal” and “http header” faking to avoid Google knowing you’re from Czech Republic and using Chrome as your favorite browser on a Windows XP and using Google Analytics (!) on your site for statistics.
This looks interesting!
I have been looking into fonts on the web quite a lot recently and previously used Cufon which basically integrates the font into your site using javascript but has the issue of copyright and therefore can’t use a lot of the standard fonts on your mac/pc. Also this method does not allow you to select the text for copy and pasting etc.
The other one I looked into was sIFR, this uses flash and javascript and is completely selectable unlike Cufon and also gets around all the copyright issues linked with fonts. I have started using this quite a lot now and works really well, only downfall is the speed compared to Cufon but is still far from being poor.
How does this google version compare to sIFR? Can you use any font and get round copyright issues? I will have to take a deeper look into this myself maybe, but always interested in finding the best possible option for font integration, so thanks for sharing :)
Google’s method is not an “image replacement” technique like Cufon or sIFR. It uses the @font-face attribute of CSS that is supported by all major browsers. One of the reasons this is slow to catch on is that most fonts are not licensed for use on the web.
What Google has done is created a repository of free, open source fonts which they host on their content delivery network.
To answer your question, you can’t use this to get around copyright issues.
Just had a look at the library again, as of yet not much choice and may as well stick to standard web fonts and using sIFR for anything fancy as this is SEO compliant and any font can be used regardless of copyright issues.
Maybe in a few months when more fonts have been added it may be a preferred choice. As I’m sure people will be adding fonts that are 99% similar to the big brand fonts anyway.
It’s fantastic in principal. The only thing that worries me is that their library of fonts is pretty limited (at the moment) and there’s a danger that loads of sites and blogs will all be using the same ‘nice’ typefaces that google are serving up – having said that, I guess 99.9% of websites are currently using Arial or Verdana anyway.
I think it will be more noticeable though when more decorative fonts will be more widely used.
actually, I think that’s an advantage. The more sites that are using a particular google-served font, the more likely it’s already saved in your visitor’s browser cache. Your site renders quicker.
And what about the interaction of the interface with your visitors? Since they are already familiar with the font, they are more likely to agree on your design, as they need less time to get used to your interface and we’ve got a new visitor. I base this on the “3-second-rule” for convincing your visitor within the first three seconds or lose the visitor completely.
yes and no. I don’t think you need a spectacularly unique font all that often anyway. For a page title, yes; for regular text, absolutely not.
I like it, it’s not revoltuionary but just making the open source fonts more widely available using the CSS standards.
Really cool of Google to work with TypeKit and interview Chris, they obviously care about the design community. I’d be screwed without Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics
Seriously guys, using the google library makes the font “jump” the first time a page loads, i don’t like that.
that is a known problem with @font-face. the javascript method shouldn’t have that “jump” though.
And if you still want to use the link tag, you should hide your content and make it visible after the DOM is ready.
Maybe it can be useful to know user tastes, otherside we’re too addicted to technology and I guess it’s the price to pay (eventually) to have everything in your hand – better: to have the possibility to have everything in your hand, at your command.
Is it just me or do all the fonts in the google font directory look so much alike that you could easily use any one of them to replace any other one?
Too much trust in one entity, no matter which, is ill advised in my opinion. Google is about 2 steps away from controlling the entire internet. Great move towards privatization!
Totally agree :-)
If you dislike this service, you should either not use it in a whole or get a paid service like Typekit. I actually suggest to use this the same way as using JS. Make sure you can do without it.
absolutely.
There’s a bug in Safari 4.0.5 on Mac OS 10.5 with the font directory page. The “Cardo” font gets some kind of weird peek-a-boo bug, bottom-half of the letter not showing up then, after some scrolling, it shows back up. Weird.
Have you tried downloading the font and loading it in a local HTML page?
good move from Google. I have no fear from Google (so far) ’cause in all what they’ve done so far, they’ve been completely transparent and follow their ‘don’t do evil’-motto.
You don’t HAVE TO use the service right ?
@Jordan Walker : I see you use Google Analytics.. isn’t that just another service from Google ?
It’s a good thing a major company like google steps in and helps out with a problem that should’ve been solved ages ago, but with competing browsers never really came off
Tom.
Painfull for fonts.com they recently announced a similar techique. These techiques are very usefull. I saw a demo on the Future of Webdesign 2010.
2 bad for fonts.com I wouldn’t want to be a competitor of google!
no problem with that since i use flash.
but still useful for my colleague.
i am only html-ing the SEO backbone for flash sites.
so we can blame you for all the horrible flash heavy sites on the web? ;)
Now, hold on :P There are actually people who, strangely, agree on using Flash.
for certain things, yes. But almost anything that *can* be done using html/js *should be*. And I’m a firm believer that everything should be able to “fall back.”
That’s actually the most practical way of going about good SEO, where as a search engine wouldn’t care if your site looks fancy, as long as there’s some proper content in there to digest. I’m a strong believer of making a site work in modern browsers and browsers like lynx and Opera mini. Actually, to get a good idea of how your website is served to a search engine, you should just fire up lynx once in a while. A good practice is to serve content in order of priority. What i’m trying to accomplish here is that people should stop adding a menu to the bottom of their page and then reposition it all the way to the top with CSS if this menu should be there in the first place. A lot of new developers could get into a similar situation where they would say: “There’s just no other way”. They’re wrong, but i won’t accuse them, but like to encourage them learning ways to actually do get the content served properly.
@encoder : Welcome in 2010.
Good luck with keeping two sites up to date (Flash and html fallback) and being unable to link to a particlular page in the flash page that is both user friendly, bookmarkable and searchable by a search-engine browsing the site (and the search results linking to that particular page in the Flash-site).
C’mon with all the respect. Flash is not a content manager. We’re not making our websites in a video editor right ? We’re not exporting our websites as JPEG’s from Photoshop, right ? We’re not building websites in Flash… right ?
Using Flash as an enhancement (for nice things, like transparent overlays with videos etc., tho that can and should be done in JavaScript too anno 2010) is one thing, but as you website ? No, sorry. Can’t imagine that.
I really like what Google has done here. I appreciate open source efforts like this and I think Google is on our side. Thanks Chris for taking that extra step to put together an interview for this article. I think it helps to kind of settle our hearts a little about this whole thing, don’t you think?
great article. and when google get more fonts, i think this will be incredibly useful.
no sure where i stand on the whole google being too powerful thing. competition is very important for us to have options and a democracy if you like.
they have all our info anyway if we use gmail, analytics etc… so i don’t think them knowing what fonts we like is that much of a problem!!!! ;)
however, the idea of privatisation of the net is pretty scary, along with the digital bill. it is food for thought.
There are major rendering problems in Windows that need to be addressed. I run Windows 7, and the fonts look terrible. Hopefully they’ll fix this soon!
Have you tested different browsers to support this?
Are the fonts now showing up for anybody else? I am running Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows and they don’t show up. I test in IE6 and the fonts show up there.
I thought the problem was FF 3.6 too, until I started unblocking sites in NoScript. As soon as I unblocked google-analytics.com the fonts showed up. But then, strangely, I was able to block it again, and the fonts still showed up on page reload (perhaps because they’re now cached on my browser). My guess is that google-analytics.com is required if you want to view these fonts served via Google.
NO, you can’t. my flash content is premium and i don’t do add banners, those are for beginners, and if you look at some of them, you realize that only a beginner can do crap in that crappy manner.
my target is speed, progressive content download, fluidity, and, well … speed
i have a shit worth PC next to me to test it.
from full flash sites, navigation, and even client side processed search engines with realtime results.
there are flash newbies and there are flash developers. the last one takes 1 1/2 years of experience and over 70k likes of code.
“the last one takes 1 1/2 years of experience and over 70k likes of code.”
70k per .swf? Hehe
This actually seems not all that much to me, but i guess that’s because Flash is pretty much all graphically done.
70k is something i could write in 2 weeks, just doing my job. I won’t judge you on that, but it’s 70k of actionscript then?
I think he meant 70,000 lines of code.
Anyway, I’m not putting down flash in general – there’s tons of awesome stuff flash can do – but I don’t think it’s appropriate as a general web tool. Flash is proprietary (free players notwithstanding; you still have to download and install them) and fairly heavy when compared to html and javascript. If your browser isn’t up-to-date or if you’re on a slower connection, Flash just means that you can’t use the site.
Movies? Games? fine. Content? no way. Html performs better, and jQuery is allowing more flash-like stuff every day. As a bonus, if you designed well, users with js turned off will still be able to use your site just fine.
First of all, i know what a k is, thank you very much.
Next up your options for using flash. I think we should get back on making games using shockwave. That technology is actually made for games, but has somewhat lost attention when Adobe took over Macromedia. The technology still exist and is proper. For loading text, you’d definitely not use Flash. Same goes for radio stations, who just need to fall back on the embed tag. Nothing wrong with that. Then there’s streaming movies. I’d actually rather have a video tag for a couple of reasons. With the video tag you could download the video without streaming, so people with a low bandwidth could still watch the video. It’s also great on making a player for movies over LAN. I now use a VLC server to manage that. Everything else could be done using JS. Even the high end interactive stuff can be done with JS. It’ll take some time to get used to that, but as does learning Flash.
sorry – I didn’t mean the “k”, I meant the typo (“likes” instead of, I assume, “lines”). If there was no misunderstanding, then I apologize.
Nice article. Looks like a simpler alternative to cufon.
Google isn’t making us do anything yet, but wait until everyone is dependent on them…
One objection I’ve heard in the past to @font-face that will resurface (or has already) with Google making this easier is that amateur hacks will use all kinds of hideous fonts just because they think they’re kinda cool, setting us back 10 years, typography-wise.
To which I say: true, but isn’t that a little like saying, “Oh, we better not allow easy image posting on the Web, because who knows what awful-looking, low-resolution, poorly cropped photos people will put up!”
What about Adobe making all their apps mainstream and digital camera’s with pretty good quality arising all the time? You can’t stop the son of your sisters neigbour to make a website for your uncle and see a bill that lets you die three times over.
umm… I think that lost something in the translation.
: )
I was trying to say that you can’t stop every goofball from making a file that contains (or even lacks) an HTML tag.
I figured it was something like that. I think it would’ve been better if I spoke your language (Dutch, yes?)
Yeah, right. And who would understand what i’m saying then? You could always ask for me to shut my mouth. I personally never get any complaints about my level of English. If it’s that bad, you can just tell me. I’d like to have as less boundaries as possible while trying to explain something, so i can bring out a message without missing half of my goal because half of you people can’t make up what i’m trying to tell.
*less=few
your english is very understandable. I think it was just an expression of speech that doesn’t work well in english.
I still the FOUT in Firefox, anyone else?
While Dutch is my spoken language, i will be your translator:
“I still got the error and Firefox is not loading any fonts. Does anyone else still have this issue?”
Well, I hope they support https because I count on it quite a lot.
So you are actually afraid that people may intercept what font you are using? I don’t get this. First of all, you shouldn’t be afraid of loading fonts over HTTP and second of all, you could make a crawler, download the fonts and host them at your own domain using HTTPS. Problem solved.
On Win 7, the fonts alias like garbage. :(
Nice. I was able to get one of these onto my site in less than a minute. Gives it a slightly different feel… until everyone starts using ’em of course ha ha
Thanks Google… more sans-serifs and slabs, please :)
That’s a great thing, I noticed it yesterday.
Maybe they should allow users to upload their fonts too…
OMG FonTube.com ;D
You are able to make suggestions for new fonts. This actually is a good way of currating the fonts. The library shouldn’t get all too bloated. There should be a nice compact list of good fonts and not an overwhelming load of “somewhat usefull” fonts.
That would present copyright issues, I think. Google couldn’t take the responsibility of checking that each submission is licensed for web distribution.
Unless you’re talking about users submitting their own (authored) fonts.
Have to try this, sounds like a great choice. Just have to be careful on the selection of fonts and be sure to set an alternative for iPhone/iPad/iPod
Just tried it. Absolutely painless… even for me ;).
Thanks Google… & thanks Chris… love your site… so much valuable info…
Have just tried this, it looks good so easy to use and the results are great. I have seen some people here complaining about Google being all powerful and such. Take a step back and say hhmmmm maybe to much coffee there lol (just kidding) sombdy has to step up and help web artists (thats us) to make things look so much more then arial or times new roman. That is my opion
Cheers all
I think this is a great feature that will get even better as the library grows. In the meantime take a second to download the Google fonts so you can use them in your Photoshop designs http://bit.ly/cHOP4n
Hey Vince,
I just read your comment and wanted to point you to our current release of a simple perl script to download all of the Google Font API Fonts available.
http://www.firmennest.de/firmennest-blog/?p=648
Cheers
It just takes a few more lines of code in your CSS file to fall back to the fonts you already have, so it’s not that you’ll be completely dependent upon Google fonts.
Thanks Chris,
In last few days i use @font-face to load server-side fonts, after this article my problem will be solved.
Thanks for the helpful post.
Thanks Chris :-)
I was lucky enough to be among first to visit when Google released Font API but until your post, I had many doubt regarding this new freebie from Google.
I can’t see how people can doubt it, Google are already huge, this alone isn’t going to make them much bigger or have much more power.
It’s a brilliant service and will only improve as more fonts are made available.
What happens if/when Google collapses? Not soon, but eventually all these sites relying on this one, big behemoth will come down with it. No thanks. :-)
If they do collapse there is always the fall back web safe font families. Or hopefully web browsers will evolve to accept a whole host of fonts instead of the limited 6-12 font families
As the fonts are free, i can actually see linux distros and Mac implementing those fonts on the local machine over some period.
I’ll be honest, I was excited about the concept behind this font project. Google always gets it right.
Great interview!
I am actually quite excited about this concept, google aren’t going to become much bigger by this. I would only say that it’s a step to true freedom with fonts.
That is sooooo pimp. Will open up a lot of doors for webdesign not having to make all the fonts images or using that sIFR.
If someone is interested in having a module for this in a CMS or WordPress, i actually made one: http://johmanx.com/webfonts.php
Just hit me up!
I was playing with this yesterday, and I discovered that the instructions are incorrect. It’s ok if you just use the standard version, but if you try to add the :b or whatever to get variants like bold, italic and so on, it breaks.
This doesn’t matter too much though. If you drop the extra bit that you’re supposed to need to get the variants YOU STILL GET THEM
Try this and you will see it works:
.lobster { font-family:Lobster, serif; font-size:20pt; }
.tangerine { font-family:Tangerine, sans; font-size:20pt; }
.yiddish { font-family:'Yanone Kaffeesatz', sans; font-size: 18pt; }
Am I not pretty?
I am not an orange, I am a free font
Stop with the boasting already!
go figure
hmm, code doesnt seem to work. oh well
.lobster { font-family:Lobster, serif; font-size:20pt; }
.tangerine { font-family:Tangerine, sans; font-size:20pt; }
.yiddish { font-family:'Yanone Kaffeesatz', sans; font-size: 18pt; }
Am I not pretty?
I am not an orange, I am a free font
Stop with the boasting already!
fingers crossed
nope still doesn’t work. oh well nm
I’m sure most of you can work out what’s happening
I do want to encourage people on commenting on other peoples comments. Even if it may not seem like i’m some newbie at webdevelopment, i’m not even anything near Chris. This said, the boundaries of being afraid to comment and make a faulty suggestion should be elevated somewhat. It’s better to make a faulty comment and be scold on than keep practicing bad designing.
The best part on commenting and getting a comment is to learn from it. Even i learn a lot from making comments.
We are the web and we decide what’s being served today and tomorrow. If we stick together, we can make a better place for all of us, just by sticking to our believes and best practices.
And no, i’m not gonna sell you a CSS bible.
I think I may have found a hack to stop the aliasing (jagged edges) on Windows machines. It only works in WebKit though, so I don’t know how useful it is.
Check it out here: http://willmoyer.com/plato/
great move.
I’ve been looking forward it for a long time.
If you happen to use Drupal as your CMS.. Check out http://drupal.org/project/google_fonts to implement Google Fonts in your website!
I think the Google font api is looking promising, however I think that the visual quality of the fonts could be improved. You can see a additional review of the Google Font API here: http://tips4php.net/2010/06/spice-up-your-site-with-google-font-api/
An small app to play with Google fonts
this is interesting…
so intersting that its running in IE………..
Hey Chris!
Any word on if or when the Google Fonts API will serve up SVG? Personally, I started implementing Google Fonts API on a bunch of projects and then realized after the fact that they were failing in iPhone / iPad. In fact, in some cases there was some lethal JS cocktail that would cause 100% replicable browser crash in mobile Safari.
I’d love to drop everything else and just @import Google’s API’s into my stylesheets but lack of support for SVG has caused me to default back to font-squirrel for @font-face.
Any advice or updates?
@Falk – I allready told you it was a usefull Link on another site i guess :)