There have been no updates for the past few months, but today I’m feeling excited enough to write about Typekit, a new service that lets you add many more fonts than the usual 5 to your repertoire of web fonts.

Last week, I received an invitation to try out the service, and I have activated it yesterday on the site. If you notice, the headings on the pages have been rendered using the Hill House font. These are not images and you can select every character individually. So far, I am excited about the service, though with some minor gripes:

1. The workflow to adding a font is a bit convoluted, with no information available about it. I had to search the forums for any problems where I found out what people did to find out how to get it to work.
2. The Javascript calls have to be placed AFTER the CSS calls – an instruction nowhere noticed on the site.
3. The pricing seems a little steep for us poor Indians, but I guess competition will take care of it (yes there is upcoming competition)
4. Not tried it yet, but I suspect the font can be managed only through the Typekit panel – need to confirm it.

Apart from it, there are no major hassles and the feature runs in the two most commonly used browsers – IE and Firefox.

As for the competition, there are a few players, fontdeck expected to open shop shortly. I am awaiting their invite to test it out. Then there is typotheque that looks interesting. There are others too, notable among them being Kernest and typeface.js with the added bonus that they are free.

I will try each one by one and hope to post the results soon.