# web font services/generators



## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

Have any of you used methods to use custom fonts (beyond the user installed ones) to set type in css?

I've seen cufon, and now looking at typekit.com , and experiences? (for commercial sites)


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## whatiwant (Feb 21, 2008)

groovetube said:


> Have any of you used methods to use custom fonts (beyond the user installed ones) to set type in css?
> 
> I've seen cufon, and now looking at typekit.com , and experiences? (for commercial sites)


I've never used it per se, but one of my favorite restaurant's website uses cufon, and it works flawlessly.


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## macpablodesigns (Jun 11, 2010)

They all will work cufon, typekit, @font-face. They all have there own quirks that you would have to take into account. If you are interested in @font-face (very easy to implement into your css), check out Font Squirrel | Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses. cufon is nice as well for being able to not include a whole bunch of things in your font files if you are not going to be using them in your styling, which is nice to keep the font file sizes down.


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## johnnyspade (Aug 24, 2007)

I use Typekit on my own website and it works well for me. Because it retains a clean cut and paste I prefer it to Cufon, especially when you're wanting to alter body copy. I like Cufon but generally don't use it unless I'm just changing headings or short bits of text.

Typekit's issue is how it looks through browsers where the use has their font smoothing turned off. As you can imagine, this is mostly a Windows user user. Many of the typefaces will render out terribly at smaller sizes. Typekit does have a nice little tool for testing how fonts appear in different browsers.


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## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

thx. It looks like I'll be using typekit. It's a commercial site for a big health company, I just want to be sure this is reliable.


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## johnnyspade (Aug 24, 2007)

The system itself is reliable but you'll want to check the site audience data, if that kind of thing is important to the project, or your client, or you. If the majority of site visitors are XP users, for example, the font rendering may not be pretty, depending on the font. It would be the same using @font-face, Flir or sIFR. 

Font smoothing is automatic for those of us on Macs, it's why things always look so damn pretty for us, and it's automatically turned on by default in Vista. XP, not so much.


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