[Special Roundup #1] New webfont technologies and tools

This is a special roundup of links and facts about webfonts. And happy easter by the way!

Icon-fonts!

The last months you probably have seen many of those "icon-fonts". They're just great and a huge improvement for icon usage on websites. But how in world should we know which one to use and where to get them from? Chris Coyer (CSS-Tricks) has summed up: Flat Icons and Icon fonts
Here's Fontomas, a webfont / iconfont creator and subsetter. You can make a limited symbols subset, with reduced font size, merge symbols from several fonts to single file, access large collections of professional-grade open source icons. Customize your fonts now! Fontomas
Then we have Entypo, a great icon-font you can use in your projects. It's under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license and free to use with attribution. The good part is it's nice, it's free, it's SVG and OpenType and will have a webfont-service soon: Entypo

Now back to technology: FontFont released a handful tool called "FF Subsetter" which let's you optimize your webfonts in just three steps. You upload your webfont, reduce (by removing letters etc) or customize the font to your own settings, and download your custom webfont. Use this if you use local webfonts! FF Subsetter
I often had the problem to only have one font-file (even when it was explicitly a webfont, licensed) e.g. OpenType. But you all know we need to have at least 3-5 different formats of the font to get it working in all major browsers. This is where the Fontsquirrel @font-face generator jumps in: You upload your webfont and it will be processed by fontsquirrel to other formats. Then you can download your complete @font-face kit including all the different font-types (TrueType, EOT, SVG, SVGZ, WOFF), the bullet-proof html/css implementation. And you also can have an 'expert mode' where you can set many options about rendering, x-height-matching, subsetting, etc. Fontsquirrel Webfont-Generator

Google WebFonts with its API is one of the most known and important webfont resource we currently have. This combined with TypeKit and FontDeck is a powerful alliance and they now created a Open Source project called "OpenTypography". This project has the goal to bring better typography to every device with a digital screen. It has very good but rather short explanations to typographic basics (or problems as they're known in the web today) such as Kerning, ligatures etc. Open Typography project

But what about the future? We need lots of more options on typography for the web / screen. And one of the bad sides of the whole font-thing is licensing. FontSlice is a new service trying to reduce font-costs for digital fonts by only let users pay for letters / characters they are actually using. It is an interesting concept and I am curious about this. FontSlice https://vimeo.com/39006356