There are a number of solutions for rendering “non-standard” web fonts on your site. I was familiar with ones like SIFR and Cufon where it’s recommend to be used only on headers or certain spots of the website. I e-mailed TypeKit to see if it worked the same way, and got this reply from Mandy Brown:
“There’s no file size or speed issue with using Typekit for body text (as there would be with, say, using SIFR or Cufon). That said, you should make sure to use a font that works well at small sizes and renders acceptably cross-browser. Be sure to take a look at the browser screenshots before deciding on a font.”
Oddly, Google failed me on this question, so I thought I’d post it here for anyone else who was curious.
my experience was that a body font rendered via typekit rendered very inconsistently at smaller sizes. firefox 3 on windows was the biggest culprit — all fonts look bad there but a font with “challenges” becomes unreadable. so test test test!
Thanks for the feedback Ari. I have noticed that pages on the Mac that render beautifully look horrible on PCs.
One way to workaround the unreadable typefaces on windows browsers is to list a readable windows only installed font before the typekit font in the stack. Sort of like a reverse-fallback.
Then have a conditional stylesheet to override this for IE9 users, as IE9 renders fonts very well.
I haven’t actually tried this, but it would be interesting to see if it would work.