Google has a beautiful web font directory, and all of the fonts are provided under open source licenses, but they don’t provide any easy way to download the TTF files onto your computer. The content of the directory has grown from just a few fonts a year ago to (as of this posting) nearly 500 fonts. Follow these instructions if you want to multiply your locally-installed font collection on a Windows box to use them in programs like Photoshop and Word.
Here are both video and text tutorials on how to get over 450 free, high-quality fonts installed on your Windows box:
Download and install TortoiseHg
TortoiseHg is a Windows interface to the Mercurial version control system. Google stores the font files in a Mercurial repository and you need TortoiseHg (or another Mercurial client) in order to get the raw files.
Clone the font repository
Once you have downloaded and installed TortoiseHg, you’ll need to check out the repository. To do this, create a new folder somewhere with at least 1GB of space on your hard drive, open it, and right-click inside of it. Choose the TortoiseHG -> Clone option, and enter the following for the ‘Source’ field: https://googlefontdirectory.googlecode.com/hg/ and click ‘Clone.’ This will take several minutes. When it’s done, search the folder for “*.ttf” to find all of the True Type Fonts in the folder, right-click, select install, and you’re done!
If you still have questions, leave a comment or check out the video tutorial I put together. I’d also love it if someone would put together a version of this for Linux and Mac.
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