Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

The choice of free fonts is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects.

SmashingMagazine has published Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs, which presents you Chunk, Titilium, Amputa Bangiz, Serif Beta, Quatro, Rough Draft, Comfortaa and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. All of them look really professional, I am sure you will find them useful for your projects.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/05/beautiful…
License: License Free

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Font^ex has spent plenty of hours to compile a list of hand-picked fonts for you. This is an amazing resource for everyone who would like to be presented with amazing free fonts to Download. They are adding some premium fonts on Font^ex soon. The site is profesionally designed. With the help of jQuery, the site becomes more interactive as well.

Source: http://www.fontex.org/

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Cufón is similar to Typeface.js which aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, and despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. Cufón consists of two individual parts as well – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.

It works on every major browser on the market. There is near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases. And it is fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text.

Requirements: Canvas and VML
Demo: http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2009/03/cufon_font_embedding/
License: License Free

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Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.

Typeface.js uses browsers’ vector drawing capabilites to draw text in HTML documents. The typeface.js project has two components: the perl module for converting fonts, and the javascript library for drawing in the browser. The perl module extracts glyph outline information from truetype fonts and writes that data in JSON format. The javascript library then traverses the HTML document and renders text using <canvas> or VML to draw the glyphs.

This code is and always will be free and open source. This includes both the typeface.js javascript library, as well as the perl module with functionality to convert truetype fonts to typeface ones.

Requirements: Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2+, Internet Explorer 6+
Demo: http://typeface.neocracy.org/
License: MIT License

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Andrew Paglinawan is a self-employed graphic designer, working in the fields of logo design, print design, web design and branding. He has released a free sans serif typeface called Quicksand with 7 weights including a dashed version. The font looks really nice and professional. You can download the font here for free.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://typophile.com/node/50437/
License: License Free

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The jQuery sIFR Plugin is an addon for jQuery that makes it easy to replace text in a web page with flash text (sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). It gives you a function in javascript to replace text in a web page dynamically with sIFR text, using native jQuery functionality along with the jQuery Flash Plugin.

The jQuery sIFR plugin is fully configurable and can choose how little or how much you want to customize the display of the sIFRed text. It uses jQuery’s native functionality to eliminate the otherwise code redundancy in SWFObject, meaning you get a much smaller filesize and even faster loading.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://jquery.thewikies.com/sifr/
License: GPL, MIT License

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TypeNeu is an odyssey in typography. TypeNeu reports on the past, present and the future of typographic culture, with main focus on typefaces and applied typography in different forms. You can see many different typography from book, fashion, illustration, magazine, packaging, poster, print and etc… Please enjoy and get some inspiration.

Source: TypeNEU - An Odyeesey in Typography

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Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.

You can view different typefaces with different font sizes and emphases. One of the handy features is that you can compare Windows rendering with Apple font rendering.

You can also download the CSS code for a specific typographic style, cach style corresponds with a style ID, which allows you to annotate prototypes and retrieve the css while coding as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.typechart.com
License: License Free

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Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. It is similar to sIFR which accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. FLIR generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) to <span> elements and everything in between.

Requirements: Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://facelift.mawhorter.net/
License: GPL License

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Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database.

Or, you can try Identifont, the largest independent directory of typefaces on the Internet, with information about fonts from 517 publishers and 144 vendors. You can identify a typeface by answering a series of simple questions about its appearance.

Requirements:-
Demo: http://www.identifont.com
Demo: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
License: License Free

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