http://googledevelopers.blogspot.de/201 ... sktop.html

http://www.fonts.com/web-fonts/google

Google has had a range of free, open source fonts available for web designers for a while now. They have joined up with Monotype to use the SkyFonts tool to automatically install the fonts on OS X and Windows systems. This should improve performance, as the web browser does not have to download the fonts when it loads the page.

You can also incorporate them directly in offline web development tools.

When designers depend on certain characters being rendered correctly, I've often thought it rather daft that they didn't include them specifically (font files can be quite tiny) or at least give more thought to their availability. It's especially bad with mathematical symbols.

We desperately need a standard that includes many of the extended character set. I have 2 generations of Android devices and more than 3 different desktop browsers, and they all render certain characters differently!

Unfortunately, not only will the uptake be quite slow but my phone will probably never be able to display them. They all render as the default font at the moment, and since my phone is over a year old it's obviously a £600 worthless piece of trash now...

There should be a fallback to support missing glyphs in fonts, so even if the character looks out of place, the missing character isn't just an empty box.

A number of repositories of online fonts let you have more than the TFT and OTF files - they also hand out files that older browsers can handle - right down to SVG files.

As always, graceful degrading is encouraged. I'll have to look into this new feature a little more, as I am very keen on the notion of web fonts.