socialrosiechen: Google Font Preview lets you play with Web Fonts

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Google Font Preview lets you play with Web Fonts

Google Font Preview is a new way to play with Google's Web Fonts API. The API is already dead-easy to use: you just include a single line of text in your Web page source code, and you can use fonts in your CSS.

But that's "ease of use" defined in web developer terms... What about the designer types who don't always feel like messing around with code just to see what stuff looks like on the screen? While they can always go for something fancy like Type Folly (which I really do like), sometimes that can be a bit of an overkill. Type Folly pulls fonts from paid services as well as Google's free one, and gives you a ton of options.

For the times when you just want to play around with a couple of sliders and be sure you're working with freely available fonts only, Google Font Preview is just what the doctor ordered. As you can see, you can set whatever text you want to play with since your playing field is just a Firefox text area (spell check works, and apparently "Hmm" is not a real word). You get sliders for playing with letter, word and line spacing, you can transform the text (capitalize, uppercase, lowercase), see what it looks like with a shadow, and apply most other CSS3 options. The tool is decidedly newbie-friendly, so you won't see terms like "kerning" or "leading" but only "letter spacing" or "line spacing".

The code you've generated is always at the bottom of the window, so once you're happy with the results you can just copy and paste it into your own page.

[Google Operating System via tobestobs]

Google Font Preview lets you play with Web Fonts originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.