I learned yesterday about Google Font API, a public access point into the Google Font Directory, and decided to give it a try on my blog (this very website you are visiting now.) Specifically, I am using Cantarell, not because it's the first on the alphabetical Google Font Directory listing, but because I tried many of the 18 font families available and felt this one best matched the modern, humble styling of my acquia marina Drupal theme.

Here's a blurb about this new Google Labs graduate from Google's full announcement at:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-google-font-api-google-font.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/Dcni+(Google+Code+Blog)

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. 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.

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

The good news is this makes font usage in CSS simple and safe across many supported browsers. The bad news is, the Google Font Directory only has 18 font families available, as I write.

So I'm excited and happy to use Google's Font API for experimentation because it does, in fact, simplify, speed up and make safe my CSS implementation, but it's going to be a while before this resource is ready for a wide range of usages.

If you are a web creative professional, please consider contributing your talent to the Google Font Directory project at:
http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/