Last week, the Google Web Fonts team announced a new feature on the Google Web Fonts Blog. Since we’re discussing this feature today at Google I/O, we’d like to share this news with Google Code Blog readers as well.
Oftentimes, when you want to use a web font on your website or application, you know in advance which letters you’ll need. This often occurs when you’re using a web font in a logo or heading.
That’s why we’re introducing a new beta feature to the Google Web Fonts API. The feature is called “text=”, and allows you to specify which characters you’ll need. To use it, simply add “text=” to your Google Web Fonts API requests. Here’s an example:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Special+Elite &text=MyText' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
Google will optimize the web font served based on the contents of this parameter. For example, if you only require a few letters for a logo, such as “MyText”, Google will return a font file that is optimized to those letters. Typically, that means Google will return a font file that contains only the letters you requested. Other times, Google might return a more complete font file, especially when that will lead to better caching performance.
Read more: Google code blog