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Comment by jackpirate | Hacker News Reader

How is this useful if everyone else hasn't already downloaded those fonts? Everyone has Ariel. That's why it is so popular.

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You can embed font declarations in CSS (the @font-face declaration), specifying a path to a download. The browser will download the font and show it on web pages with the declaration.

Google offers an array of freely-available (open source, actually, I think, but I'm not 100% sure) fonts that are hosted on their servers that you can use.

> (open source, actually, I think, but I'm not 100% sure)

To quote from the "introduction" dialog [0]: "Hundreds of free, open-source fonts optimized for the web".

Looking further, the "about" page [1] provides a bit more information: "All the Google web fonts are open source. That means that you are free to to use them in any way you want, independent of whether you're working on a private or commercial project."

I'm not sure what license they're using, though . . . I can't find anything but Google's standard "terms of service" license anywhere on the site.

[0] http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2#HomePlace:home

[1] http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2#AboutPlace:about

The licenses are on the individual fonts' pages (try the "Pop Out" links.) Most of them are under the SIL Open Font License.

That makes a lot more sense... I'm a little behind the times I guess with my CSS.

The fonts are delivered from Google in real-time and don't have to be pre-downloaded. That's the beauty of it!

But of course Arial is still a good default.

"Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial is a better default! Show the good one to those of us that have it (all Mac OS X and iOS users).

Helvetica usually looks like shit on Windows if the user happens to have it. So you might try a different order, or just rely on most Mac users having Helvetica Neue.

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