As an interactive designer, getting good solid typographic control of "system text" seems to be a constant battle. In an age of endless typeface choices to choose from, I am amazed that in the year 2008, I find myself continuing to design within the constraints of Arial, Helvetica, Times, Courier, Georgia, Verdana, Geneva and Trebuchet.

I remember a work around for headlines and short subheads that had it's own set of limitations called P+C DTR (PHP + CSS Dynamic Text Replacement) but seldom saw it used, and I believe it has since been put to rest.

This morning I stumbled on a very useful design tool, csstypeset. It provides an intuitive and familiar set of type controls, and demonstrates in real time not only the visual effect of the sytem text being rendered, but also yields a chunk of .css code that you can paste into your stylesheet once you are content.

Another useful tool is Typetester, which is similar to csstypeset, but also allows comparison between 3 typeface choices as well.

I think this is useful not only to experienced designers, but younger designers starting out, to easily push your online typography a bit while gaining a sense of the limitations of the system text fonts we currently have available. While designers like Craig Kroeger of miniml and others have designed a variety of pixel based fonts, they remain unavailable as part of the lowest common denominator safe set of fonts.

We can only hope that one day, there will be a greater selection to choose from when designing non-flash websites. In the meantime, these are both good ways to get more out of your typography, while designing within the inherent constraints of the medium.