Microsoft is making one of their new Vista fonts, Consolas available for download. Consolas is a monospaced typeface that would look great in any text editor that you might use.

Linotype FontExplorer X is a great font manager for OSX and is completely free! You can organize your fonts using libraries, folders, tags and even smart sets in a familiar file-management like interface.

Richard Rutter of Clearleft has a great site devoted to The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. It provides a practical guide to web typography, an area that has been ignored by too many web developers - myself included!

Typetester is an web-based application that allows you to compare how different fonts will display on a screen. It’s primary role is to make web designer’s or web developer’s life easier. The author promises that as the new fonts are bundled into various operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

This post has been removed at the request of Microsoft’s lawyers.

Mike Davidson has just announced that sIFR 2.0 has been officially released. sIFR provideds “Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses”, by allowing web designers to include any font via a small flash movie embedded into their web sites. The technique is mainly used to replace headings by using the JavaScript and the DOM and degrades nicely if the client browser does not support either Flash, JS or the DOM.

Information designer Mark Boulton has just begun a series of articles titled Five simple steps to better typography. Part one discusses the measure and part two introduces you to hanging punctuation.

Kevin Larson from Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technology group has a facinating paper titled – The Science of Word Recognition. He states that…

Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicate that we use the letters within a word to recognize a word. Many typographers and other text enthusiasts Ive met insist that words are recognized by the outline made around the word shape.

Kevin’s article that is based on research that proves otherwise and points to many peer reviewed studies.

[link via mezzoblue]

Tom Murphy is offering a whole bunch of Free Fonts. The fonts have mostly been created while doodling in class and unfortunately there are only PC versions of these fonts!

Web Page Design for Designers latest issue presents a nice article titled All you wanted to know about Web type but were afraid to ask. The article has details regarding what fonts to use on what platforms and safe ways of specifying those fonts in your CSS.