engine - 4:19 pm on May 20, 2010 (gmt 0)

Google Releases 18 Open Source Fonts [news.cnet.com]

But font licensing rules mean a Web designer can't necessarily upload any old font for a site. This is where Google's move, announced at its Google I/O conference, comes in. The company released 18 fonts and also announced an interface that lets Web sites use them. "Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory," said Raph Levien and David Kuettel of the Google Font API team in a blog post. "With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called "web-safe" fonts that come installed on most computers."

In addition, Google announced an open-source project called WebFont Loader to supply Web developers with code to deal with differences in how browsers handle downloaded Web fonts.