Adobe, Google Partner for Edge Web Fonts

Adobe offers up Google Web Fonts and more through its free new service, Adobe Edge Web Fonts.
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Adobe Edge Web Fonts service. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

As part of its new Edge Suite of tools for web developers Adobe has announced Edge Web Fonts, a new free service much like Google Web Fonts.

In fact Adobe has partnered with Google to make most of Google's open source fonts available through Edge Web Fonts as well. Both services also include the Source Sans Pro open source font family Adobe released earlier this year and the brand-new Source Code Pro.

The full list of fonts available through the service can be found on Adobe's new Edge Fonts site, though sadly there's no way to preview them. Previews of what Adobe's Typekit blog calls the "more popular" options can be found on the Edge Web Fonts page.

Adobe also plans to work with Google to improve many of the fonts, adding hinting for better rendering at smaller sizes and optimizing other aspects for better-looking, better-performing fonts. The company plans to open source its improvements so even if you prefer to stick with Google Web Fonts you'll still eventually have access to better looking fonts.

So why go with Adobe's new Edge Fonts over Google's existing service? There's really no advantage if you're already happy with Google's offering, especially if you're downloading Google's fonts and serving them yourself, since that eliminates the chance that Adobe's (or Google's) servers will go down and take your fonts with them. Of course Edge Fonts is powered by Typekit, which has proved itself reliable over the years.

For more info on Adobe Edge Web Fonts head on over to the Typekit Blog, or check out the sample code to take them for a spin on your site today.

[Update: Developer Tony Stuck has put together a very nice preview page of the Adobe Edge Fonts for those that would like to actually see the fonts before diving in, which, presumably, is everyone.]