Typekit, the web service that helps designers use elaborate typefaces in their page designs, is celebrating its one year anniversary with a big announcement: the company has added 16 of Adobe’s popular font families to Typekit’s ever-growing stable of options.

With the addition of Adobe’s fonts to TypeKit’s already large library, designers now have access to popular workhorse fonts like Adobe Garamond, News Gothic, Myriad and Minion, as well as slightly funkier options like Rosewood or Trajan, the “movie font.” These typefaces are heavily used in the print publishing world.

The new Adobe fonts are the original cuts of the typefaces, not reproductions or downgraded web versions of the designs. This means it’s now possible to use them just like you would in print work with same rendering accuracy and technical detail you’d see on paper. Monday’s development should have a positive impact on the use of fancier fonts on the websites of old-school institutions and larger corporations — companies which have been using Adobe products to build their print materials for years. Now that they have the same level of control over details like kerning pairs and line height on the web, they’ll have an easier time making the jump.

Adobe is a little late to the party — the company is one of the last major font foundries to partner with Typekit — but Typekit President and co-founder Bryan Mason tells Webmonkey the reason for the delay is a heavy attention to detail.

“Adobe has been working on the hinting and screen rendering of these (and others to follow) for months,” says Mason, “[that] means character-by-character, weight-by-weight review of each font family.”

Typekit is like a YouTube for fonts. The service lets web developers pick a font from its library, pay a licensing fee to the font creator (though some fonts are free), then use that font across their website. Unlike many fancy type solutions on the web, TypeKit isn’t using any sort of image replacement for rendering fonts, just the standard CSS @font-face declaration with a minimal amount of JavaScript to simplify the process and account for various browser versions. The service is one of the easiest ways for web designers to use creative fonts without sacrificing web standards or violating font licenses — most of the time, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting some code snippets. There are also options specifically designed for easy integration with popular publishing platforms like WordPress. The company also released an API last month, allowing third parties to integrate Typekit font selection into their apps.

If you’d like to try the new fonts on your site, head over to Typekit and log in to your account. The fonts are available for all paid Typekit accounts. If you’re using the limited, free option you’ll have to settle for Adobe Garamond, the only family that Typekit is giving away.

See Also:

• Typekit Gets an API
• Typekit Now Offering Custom Fonts For WordPress Blogs
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Google, Typekit Join Up to Improve Web Fonts

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Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes.

The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it’s giving people the option of building Typekit into their own apps or simply extending the way they use the service.

Writing on the Typekit blog, Paul Hammond says: “The Typekit API gives you the ability to programmatically create, modify and publish kits. It also allows them to fetch metadata about all the fonts in the Typekit library.”

Here are the documentation pages. As you can see, the Typekit API returns data in a few different flavors (JSON, XML and YAML)

There’s an example page set up on Github, and while there isn’t much there yet (just a kit generator for Ruby) we can expect more soon.

If you haven’t yet explored Typekit’s service for including fancy fonts in your site designs, you should. Especially handy is the WebFont Loader, an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the “flash of unstyled text” that happens when a page loads. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when and how their fonts are loaded onto the page.

See Also:

• Typekit Now Offering Custom Fonts For WordPress Blogs
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Google, Typekit Join Up to Improve Web Fonts

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has announced a new Font API and a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their site designs for free. The Google Font API allows you to embed any of the new Google fonts on your website using CSS.

The fonts themselves are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. They can all be used to style text via @font-face. There are only eighteen fonts available — so there’s probably no need for Typekit to worry that Google is muscling in on its territory.

In fact, Typekit has partnered with Google to announce WebFont Loader, a JavaScript library for improving the web font experience. Typekit will also be adding Google’s new free fonts to its collection, so there’s clearly still a lot of love there.

The WebFont Loader is an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the “flash of unstyled text” page load hiccup that we’ve mentioned before. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when their fonts load.

Even though things have been progressing quickly in the world of type on the web, with advancements in CSS, HTML5 and the rise of services like Typekit, inconsistencies in browser support and implementation have stopped some from making the move to web fonts. The new WebFont Loader gives hope to those still on the fence by providing a consistent way to handle what the browser does while the fonts are being loaded.

“The WebFont Loader does for @font-face what jQuery has done for JavaScript,” says Typekit co-founder Jeffrey Veen in an e-mail to Webmonkey. “For people who really care about about the speed and user experience of their web pages, the WebFont Library gives them much more control. It essentially moves us a big step forward in the evolution of fonts on the web.”

Veen also praises Google’s decision to keep its work open source and free.

“Getting fonts technically ready for web use is a lot of work, and using the open source model allows anyone to contribute their expertise to a core set of fonts.” he says.

You can use WebFont Loader with fonts on your own server, with links to the just-announced Google Webfont API, or with your Typekit account.

Google made the announcement at its annual Google I/O developer conference, which is taking place in San Francisco this week.

As for Google’s new Font API, well, it’s so simple its hardly an API. You just need to add a link to Google’s stylesheet in the head tags of your page and then apply that font to some element in your page.

The syntax looks like this:

Then, in your stylesheet, you can apply that font to any body element. For example:

h1 {
  font-family: 'Font Name', serif;
}

Google’s new Font API will work in any browser that supports @font-face (which is pretty much all of them). If the Google fonts happen to strike your fancy, the API is certainly easy to use. If you’re looking for a broader selection, check out Typekit.

Typekit offers Google’s new open source fonts, Veen says, but Typekit also offers access to a library of over 4,000 commercial fonts of professional quality. Typekit is currently the only source offering these high-quality typefaces for legal use on the web.

Disclosure: Jeff Veen is a former Webmonkey editor and a former Wired.com employee.

See Also:

• Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
• Google Chrome to Support the Web Open Font Format
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Use @font-face Today With Free, Legal Fonts
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses

View full post on Webmonkey