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It's gone, which is a real shame, I should've made more use of it. Where's the best place to go to get free ampersands that I can then embed using @font-face in CSS?

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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Check out The League of Movable Type over at http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/. All of their fonts are free, designer-created, and come with the fonts needed for @font-face usage.

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Thanks, I'll check it out. But is there no new dedicated place for ampersands? – Ahmed Nuaman Dec 16 '11 at 19:38
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I can't imagine the demand for 'web fonts that only have one character' is all that high. ;) – DA01 Dec 16 '11 at 20:03
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The ampersand was a special case. A lot of web typography people were fond of sites like this. The use case is that you want to use a font, but its ampersand is no good. You therefore go to one of these sites that hosts just ampersands for either linking or downloading. The size of a font with one character is extremely small, so it doesn't slow down your website's loading time by much. – Alexei Dec 17 '11 at 21:05
A lot of people are fond of lots of ridiculous things :) – Joonas Dec 17 '11 at 22:05
I completely understand that, Alexei. Just saying the demand isn't all that high. For one character, a GIF can still do the job just fine much of the time. – DA01 Dec 20 '11 at 3:59
up vote 5 down vote

Google Web Fonts allows you to do pretty much what the ampersand site did, and perhaps with even more fonts to choose from. Check out the GWF Getting Started page linked below, and look for the section titled "Optimizing your font requests (beta)" which talks about how to link a small subset of any Google Web Font for use on your site. This will allow you to link just the ampersand and nothing else, like you wanted.

http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.html

Don't forget... you have to encode the ampersand symbol when using this method. The ampersand encoding is just %26 for URLs. Here's an example using the encoding to link the ampersand from a font called Inconsolata:

<link rel="stylesheet" 
      type="text/css" 
      href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=%26">
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cool feature! Nice to know! – DA01 Dec 20 '11 at 3:59
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The only drawback with this is that you silently sell another piece of your sole to a monopoly company. – mcb Dec 23 '11 at 23:03
Selling your soul? How so? – Alexei Dec 24 '11 at 1:47
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If you're a graphic designer, you've already been doing that for decades (Macromedia, Adobe, Quark, Apple, Pantone, Wacom, etc, etc.) – DA01 Jan 3 '12 at 5:48

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