I’ve put together a list of 14 of the nicest online typography related web-applications found on the internet today, and yes, every single one of them is free.
Font Tester
“Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them. It is very useful for web developers who are looking for just the right font/style/color to use in their pages. To use it all you have to do is simply enter the text you would like to preview, modify the various CSS properties until you find a style you like, and then click on the Get CSS Code button to generate all the necassary CSS code to reproduce those styles in your webpage.”
Type Tester
“What is Typetester?
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.
Technical details
Typetester’s code structure is XHTML, styled with the finest CSS and driven by the JavaScript for manipulating DOM structures. Typetester will not work without JavaScript enabled.”
Your Fonts
“YourFonts.com is a FREE online font generator that allows you to create your own OpenType fonts within a couple of minutes. Go make your own handwriting as a font!”
CSS Typeset
Typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively style their web content.
sIFR
“sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash, which renders the font. It degrades gracefully if Flash is not present. sIFR 3 is open source and licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL.”
Check out the sIFR3 demo here.
TrueType Font to Sifr Flash
Convert TrueType fonts to a Sifr Flash file.
Vertical rhythm calculator
“For years we have touted the phrase ‘the web is not print’ and consequently have forgotten about the basics of designing for type, like working to a baseline rhythm. I have come across many a design where the developer has not thought about typography before diving straight into the code. The result is a mess of random amounts of padding and margin married with unnecessary style rules, this in turn leads to CSS code that is harder to understand and maintain.”
Type Chart
“Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.”
Font Struct
“FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.”
PXtoEM
“Pixels and points are static measurements. 1 pixel is always 1 pixel. 1 point is always 1 point. Points are a little different because they change size based on DPI. On paper, with its higher DPI, 12 point text is actually more pixels that 12 point text on a computer monitor, which has a lower DPI than paper.
Percent and EMs on the other hand are relative measurements. The size of EM or percent-based text depends on its parent. If body text is sized at 12 pixels, then text set at 120% or 1.2 EM inside the body will be 1.2 * 12, or 14.4 pixels.”
Text2PNG
“text2PNG.com provide webmasters with the ability to convert their website headlines and navigations to PNG images automaticlly. The process is very simple and automated, it works by adding a small JavaScript file and selecting which tags to replace. The purpose of this script is to ease editing graphical headlines and navigations. For example, you can change the headline in Photoshop, optimize and save the image and upload it to the server to update a graphical headline, or just change the headline text in your HTML file and the image will automaticlly update.”
Font Burner
“Font Burner is a website enhancement tool that makes it easy for you to add new fonts to your website. Websites are basically limited to the default fonts that come with all computers. That’s because a user must have the fonts installed on their computer in order to have it show up in their browser. Font Burner bypasses this limitation with our archive of fonts that work universally in all browsers and on all computers. By adding a simple block of code to your webpages you can transform your headlines from boring system fonts to any of the quality fonts found here at Font Burner! There is nothing to install, and best of all, it’s free!”
fontBROWSER
“FontBrowser is a FREE online flash application that allows you to preview the fonts active on your system.”
1001 Free Fonts
You can select any available font and enter your own custom text to get a much better idea of how the font will look in the end.
Magnificent input about search engine optimization. I’m honestly very flabbergasted that that hasn’t been stated before to such an extent.