As part of an ongoing improvement of the Google Docs platform as a collaboration tool, Google is now implementing web fonts as part of its word processing repertoire. Typically, text on a webpage is rendered from fonts located on your own computer. This practice has led to the standardization of a few key fonts that pretty much everyone has. These basic fonts (Georgia, Ariel, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Lucida, Verdana, etc.) make up the Internet’s text, and a robust word processor would want more than the few standards to create documents.

Enter web fonts. Web fonts are hosted on the web server instead of on the client PC, and the font is accessed whenever a client accesses the site. Using this method, Google is rolling out six new fonts today on Google Docs, and they are promising many more in the future. The fonts added today are:

Droid Serif

Droid Sans

Calibri

Cambria

Consolas

Corsiva

In addition to adding the fonts to Docs, Google also released the Google Font API, giving developers the tools to add these and other web fonts to their own websites.

The addition of web fonts to Google’s huge warehouse of web technologies should go a long way in making Google Docs an increasingly more popular place to collaborate on text documents. With the downfall of Google Wave, Google will likely be depending on Docs to be their flagship collaboration tool. The Google Font API will take this proliferation a step further, allowing web fonts to penetrate the web design world through a simple API.