All the Google Fonts including Playfair Display are now available in Monotype’s SkyFonts service. The application can be downloaded, and the fonts can be browsed and selected here. Furthermore, fonts are automatically updated to latest versions, and the selected fonts are synced across your computers.

Playfair Display now available in Monotype’s SkyFonts service
Кириллица
Playfair Display have been updated. It now covers the cyrillic glyphs used in Bulgarian, Belarusian, Russian, Bosnian/Serbian (including Serbian morphology for б), and Ukrainian.
Additionally, Playfair Display now comes in three weights and two styles, including small-caps for all weights and styles – also for the cyrillic.
Go to Google Webfonts to use Playfair Display as a webfont, or to download the fonts to your computer. Special fonts containing small-cap glyphs in the place of the lowercase glyphs have also been put on Google Webfonts. Use these fonts for true small-caps in browsers without OpenType capabilities. You do not need to download these fonts as the small-caps are already in Playfair Display proper.
As you may know, Playfair Display is published under the Open Font License 1.1, granting you license to use the fonts free of charge, and enables you to extend & modify the family should you wish to. The complete source-files are available here.
I hope users of the cyrillic script will find good use for Playfair Display, and I wish you much enjoyment with it.
Playfair available through Adobe Edge Web Fonts
Adobe’s recent acquisition Typekit has partnered up with Google Web Fonts to offer a selection of the Google Web Fonts available through Adobe Edge Web Fonts, a new free web font service.
Playfair Display is included in this selection, and I hope it will find even more use among the many web designers and coders.
‘ttfautohint’ as a Service updated to 0.9
Following up on the ttfautohint as a service, here is an updated service with the 0.9 binary. Just download, un-zip, and double-click on the ttfautohint workflow. OS X will prompt you to open or install, choose install, and choose to replace the existing workflow. This service only works in OS X Lion 10.7 and newer.
Download ttfautohint-0.9-as-Service
‘ttfautohint’ 0.8 as a Service
Following up on the ttfautohint as a service, here is an updated service with the 0.8 binary. Just download, un-zip, and double-click on the ttfautohint workflow. OS X will prompt you to open or install, choose install, and choose to replace the existing workflow. This service only works in OS X Lion 10.7 and newer.
Download ttfautohint-0.8-as-Service
Werner Lemberg’s ‘ttfautohint’ 0.7 as an OS X Service
Werner Lemberg is developing a novel auto-hinter for TrueType fonts. It is based on the FreeType rasterizer.
To make it easy for typeface designers to test the capabilities of ttfautohint I have created a self-contained Service for OS X. Please note that ttfautohint is pre-release software and should not be used for production purposes. Please note that ttfautohint is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2.
Just un-zip and double-click the ttfautohint file. OS X will prompt you to either edit or install the Service; choose install. Done.
Use it by right-clicking on one or more TTFs, then choose ttfautohint from within the Services menu-item. The Service will now start auto-hinting the fonts and save them in the same folder under new names in the style of foo.
There have been some reports of problems installing and running this Service in versions of OS X earlier than 10.7. If you run into trouble try manually placing the Service in ~/Library/Services/, and if that folder does not exist, create it first.
Download ttfautohint 0.7 as Service
Playfair Display Regular now published
I’m pleased to announce that the first font of the Playfair family is now published on the Google Web Fonts service. The font is the regular weight of the display family, and the italic font is soon to follow. You are free to download and use the font on your computer. Using the font as a webfont is very easy – just grab the code from here and start using Playfair on your web pages.
Should you have comments or discover bugs, I would encourage you to comment on this article or contact me directly.
Playfair
I have been given financial support by the Google Web Fonts team to design a typeface family. In fact you are looking at this design right now. This website uses Playfair Display (as the typeface is named) as a webfont to display the text.
Playfair is a transitional design. From the time of enlightenment in the late 18th century, the broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to become increasingly detached from the written ones. Developments in printing technology, ink and paper making, made it possible to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines.
This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the designs of printer and typeface designer John Baskerville, the punchcutter William Martin’s typeface for the ‘Boydell Shakspeare’ (sic) edition, and from the ‘Scotch Roman’ designs that followed thereafter.
As the name indicates, Playfair Display is well suited for titling and headlines. It has an extra large x-height and short descenders. It can be set with no leading if space is tight, for instance in news headlines, or for stylistic effect in titles. Capitals are extra short, and only very slightly heavier than the lowercase characters. This helps achieve a more even typographical colour when typesetting proper nouns and initialisms. Languages, like German, where nouns are capitalized, particularly benefit from this lower contrast between lower and upper case glyphs. In German, with it’s many capitalized words, and other European languages that use many diacritical characters, it is advised to use more leading.
Being a transitional design, stylistically Playfair can accompany Georgia, where Georgia is used for body text.
Playfair includes a full set of SMALL CAPS (currently only supported by the Firefox 4 or newer browser), common ligatures, and discretionary ligatures. For Polish, a set of alternate diacritical characters designed with ‘kreska’s are included. All European languages using the latin script are supported. →A set of eight arrow devices are also included←.
Once the latin script part is finished, I will expand the fonts to cover the Cyrillic script.
Once the regular weight is released I will announce it here. Watch this website for further information on Playfair.
