Unless you closely follow the developments of the Google Docs service you would more than likely have missed this update. Previously, Google Docs had a somewhat limited number of fonts from which to choose which could make documentation bland and limited in its professional use depending upon your requirements.
Starting today, Google has added six new fonts to Google Docs and is planning to release more fonts over the coming months. The great thing is that web fonts don’t need to be installed on your computer as they are loaded over the web as required. An added benefit to this approach is that fonts do not need to be formatted or encoded in a special way for each operating system on which a web font is utilised. This means that the only thing that you would require is a capable browser (of which modern versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome support).
Whilst this may be a fairly minor thing, this is a very small step toward the cloud replacing resources that exist locally on hard drives that may be used quite infrequently and put an end to websites that are designed for the lowest common denominator. I know when I have designed websites in the past that I was fairly safe to stick with Arial or Verdana as the font of choice but the proliferation of web fonts may allow web designers some more freedom without resorting to images and wrestling with DIV tables.
I guess for the average user this is a bit of a “ho-hum” sort of thing. You won’t notice anything different, just the content is delivered and supported slightly differently. I think this is more exciting for developers who can both share and consume fonts on the web with minimal fuss and effort.
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