Why Use Them?
Because a font is an operating system resource, not a browser resource.
If you have an unusual font installed on your PC, it’s easy to design a Web page and include that font. You can see it because the font is installed on your operating system. But if your visitors don’t have it installed too, their browsers will display their default font instead.
From a page designer’s perspective, this is a big weakness. You want pages to display like you intend, but can’t control an individual browser’s display. No matter how carefully you lay out your page with a particular font, you’re at the mercy of the user’s browser when the page is displayed.
For years designers have wanted to achieve true representation of their designs irrelevant of Browser or Operating System. That’s where embedded fonts come in: with them, you don’t have to worry about browsers defaulting to a more common font. Instead, your font downloads along with the page.
Along Came Google Fonts
The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.
Notice the headline on this page has changed we use embeddable Fonts. supplied by Google. Our main site uses “Corben”‘ and can be found here the font on this page has change to “Coda” just for demonstration purposes. Now all visitors will see the same irrelevant of computer or browser that they are on.
Unfortunately the currently available font repository is limited but a resource worth monitoring for the future.
FontDeck
Claim that their catalogue contains thousands of professionally designed fonts, all enhanced for on-screen use.
Because FontDeck hosts the font files you can be guaranteed that visitors to your site will always get the latest and best versions of the fonts.
Fonts start from $2.99/year. Further info can be found Here
TypeKit
As with FontDeck TypeKit claim to have thousands of fonts in their library starting with their personal service which allows 50,000 Page views/month : 2 Websites : 5 Fonts per site all for a price of $24.99 per year. Further info can be found Here
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