Preview fonts with Google Font Previewer | Hacker News Reader

Preview fonts with Google Font Previewer

code.google.com

65 pointskeltex9 comments

I didn't know Google had free webfonts on their CDN available to all. That's great!

http://code.google.com/webfonts

http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.ht...

I could see this being useful, but it's not quite there yet. There are a few things I think it needs to support first:

    - comparing two fonts side-by-side
    - seeing multiple fonts/sizes/styles in the same panel so you can try
      to put together a whole title/body font hierarchy
    - alternate justifications--centered is not how I want to view body text

Until then, this isn't really a substitute for opening up a rich-text editor and doing it all in there, unfortunately.

(The text-editing component of this is fantastic though. I'll be very happy if this kind of thing starts making its way to more places.)

Agreed, especially the point about alternate justifications. Using a non-centered justification would make it easier to see at a glance which fonts are monospace, which would help a lot for, say, exploring programming fonts (my primary use for font viewers).

Ideally, the list-of-font-names would have some hint where the font fits on major dimensions -- either by the common practice of rendering the name in the font, or by adding small icons/notations for monospace/serif/script/etc.

This is great as it is, but it would be icing on the cake if they offered the option to specify fonts via url and be able to perform the same functionality and preview them.

I had no idea you could import fonts into the browser.

Which browser support this?

From their FAQ:

        * Google Chrome: version 4.249.4+
        * Mozilla Firefox: version: 3.5+
        * Apple Safari: version 3.1+
        * Opera: version 10.5+
        * Microsoft Internet Explorer: version 6+

        The Google Font API is not currently 
        supported on iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Android

It's based on @font-face, which has been around for a while, but stalled over worries about font licensing, and disagreements over which font formats to use. It's slowly been getting support and is now in most major browsers, though I believe IE and non-IE browsers (as often) still don't support quite the same set of font formats, which is one thing the Google Font API wraps.

Here's the w3c's page on @font-face itself: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-resources

Interesting they went with jquery ui rather than using the closure library...

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