Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes.
The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it's giving people the option of building Typekit into their own apps or simply extending the way they use the service.
Writing on the Typekit blog, Paul Hammond says: "The Typekit API gives you the ability to programmatically create, modify and publish kits. It also allows them to fetch metadata about all the fonts in the Typekit library."
Here are the documentation pages. As you can see, the Typekit API returns data in a few different flavors (JSON, XML and YAML)
There's an example page set up on Github, and while there isn't much there yet (just a kit generator for Ruby) we can expect more soon.
If you haven't yet explored Typekit's service for including fancy fonts in your site designs, you should. Especially handy is the WebFont Loader, an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the "flash of unstyled text" that happens when a page loads. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when and how their fonts are loaded onto the page.
See Also:
