Google Fonts is an absolutely awesome collection of web fonts that you may use in your HTML web pages without any restrictions.

These fonts not only look more beautiful than the common typefaces like Arial and Verdana but they are more readable as well since the fonts have been designed specifically for the web. Also, all Google web fonts are offered under the Open Font License meaning you may use them even in commercial projects without having to worry about licensing issues.

Google Fonts are hosted on google.com and all you need to do is include a few lines of CSS (or JavaScript) to embed one or more of these fonts in your web pages.

Use Google Fonts on your Computer

Other than websites, you may also use Google fonts in your Office documents, Photoshop designs or any other computer program.

There’s no trick involved here. Because all Google fonts are open source, you are free to download and install them on to your local computer. Once the fonts are installed, you may use them in documents just like any other standard font.

How to Download Google Fonts?

There are two ways to download Google Fonts to your computer.

If you would like to have a copy of all the Google fonts locally, simply go to googlecode.com and download the entire fonts directory using leeching tools like HTTrack or Wget. The entire collection weighs around 700 MB and may therefore take a while to download depending on your Internet connection.

The other recommended approach is selective download. Open the Google Fonts directory, pick your favorite typefaces (or fonts) and add them to a collection. Once you have collected the desired fonts, click the “Download your Collection” link at the top and you’ll get a zip file containing all the requested fonts in TTF format. Here’s a quick demo:

Just unzip the collection and drag the individual TTF files to your fonts folder. Now you can use the fonts in Office or any other application on your computer.

A word of caution though. If you create a presentation with Google Fonts and send it to someone else, they may not have the same fonts installed on their computer and thus the presentation will look very different from the original.

Google Fonts are open source so you can either attach a copy of the fonts with the presentation itself or better still, simply embed the fonts in the document before sending one.