From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to turn fonts into a "service" by hyping the hosting aspect. It would be like if jQuery said you can't serve jquery.js from your web server, you can only link to it, and then they start offering paid versions of jQuery.

I realize fonts are a commercial product, but my understanding is that Google Web Fonts really are free to use in your apps, whereas this is a free service. According to the terms, it is illegal to "retransmit" the "Service Materials".

Thanks.

The website itself has hardly any frills.

"Adobe Edge Tools & Services: New tools and services for a beautiful, modern web."

"Edge Web Fonts is conveniently built into Edge Code today and will be available in Edge Reflow and other Edge Tools & Services soon."

I'm reading all this and I still have no idea what Edge is or why I should care.

A much more informative link for the HN audience is this: http://www.edgefonts.com/

-- Edge Web Fonts gives you access to a vast web font library made possible by contributions from Adobe, Google, and designers around the world. The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability. Plus, it’s free! --

Neither do the people who wrote it, I can assure you :)

After following most of the links on the page, I can't find any mention of limits on pageviews or traffic. On the surface of it, that makes their free offering a little bit better than their paid offering.

Adobe® Edge Web Fonts: Paid for graciously by the users of Typekit.

    <script src="http://use.edgefonts.net/league-gothic.js"></script>

    font-family: "Obscure Font", "Common Font", sans-serif;

"The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability."

Fonts provided by Google are better in character range coverage. Anyway, thanks Adobe.

Also: http://jsfiddle.net/6zUQu/1/

It seems that only the example on their site includes 'default' character set. Note that, though, sadly not all fonts have different than latin-1, or partial latin-1-ext.

Helping to improve fonts that are not just freely available, but freely available on services other than your own? It's almost like I'm starting to feel goodwill towards Adobe. It's rather strange.

On the other hand, Adobe's typography people seem to be consistently good at producing high quality work, selling it at reasonable prices, and offering it on reasonable terms. Consequently, probably 90% of the money I've spent on serious fonts over the years has gone to Adobe, because they blow away the the-90s-called-they-want-their-printers-back silliness of certain other well known foundries, who either haven't noticed that we use fonts more on-screen than in print these days or who shamelessly advertise one price when the actual price to buy a useful product is presumably higher (presumably, because they never seem to tell you how much those extra permissions will actually cost).

Also, because it's implied otherwise, it should be stated that Brackets is an Adobe-created/-owned project. The two are still quite tied together, as Brackets improvements are pushed into Edge Code releases.

Is there going to be a new competition over who has the 'cutting-edge' fonts?

http://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/introducing-adobe-edge-we...

With that said and paranoia of external asset serving/hosting, does anyone know if these fonts can be self-hosted?

This changes everything

~jk

Considering this is built on top of Typekit — which does support Web Font Loader — this is surprising.

[1] - https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader

[1] http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/#edgeWebFonts

http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/vag-rundschrift/

I thought fonts basically just vector graphics. Since these are just java-script files, how are they being distributed? How do these work?

google: embed css link, the negotiation which one to download is made server-side

adobe: embed js link, the negotiation which one to download is made client-side

Prepare for some resource hogging :)

http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html

There is a point to this rant. I have used Adobe products my entire working life. I loved Adobe and the products they made. But now...? I am what happens when you treat your users like shit, and everyone else like idiots.

Fortunatly for me, my inflated opinion and militant outlook is made more tenable when they keep releasing turds like this.