Typekit : Java Glossary

A scheme for putting proprietary fonts on your web pages. Typekit is an Adobe subsidiary. It costs only a year for personal use (50,000 page hits per month and five fonts). It uses the @font-face feature of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), though you never actually put the letters @font-face anywhere on your web pages or CSS style sheets. TypeKit JavaScript inserts them logically into the DOM (Document Object Model) for you. Fonts are loaded from a distributed farm of Adobe servers. It works by putting two JavaScript loads into the header of a page that will use custom fonts. I discovered, it will also work if you put them immediately after the header. You can mention the custom fonts in your style sheets, or can tell the Typekit control panel at the Typekit website which styles to override with custom fonts.

You might wonder why Typekit uses JavaScript when other webfont schemes such as FontDeck manage avoid it. It lets Typekit detect the specific browser and customise the solution to the quirks of that browser. It also lets them download native PostScript fonts with superior hinting quality for small font sizes. PostScript is not usually supported by @font-face. It also lets them avoid FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text). Otherwise, if font-loading is slow, you might see a FOUT, a temporary preview in a substitute font.

You can get a month free trial to experiment. Even the trial gives you access to 2 of 191 fonts. The personal library has 555 fonts. The full library has 703 fonts. There are, of course, many Adobe fonts, which tend to be higher quality than average. They carry fonts from 42 foundries.

To see the fonts locally, you need a local web server. You won’t see the fonts if you just load pages directly off hard disk. You also have to the Typekit website to include localhost as one of your supported domains.

Unfortunately, Typekit does not permit you to use custom fonts in Applets or Java Web Start applications. Further, they have no plans to.