When you create a font stack, you are creating a fallback system for your customers. If they don't have the first font, the page will display with the second, and so on. But most designers don't test their pages looking at the alternate fonts, and this can cause problems with some designs. The challenge is that it can be tedious to view and remove all your fonts one at a time to do testing on them. And there aren't a lot of alternatives to doing that. But this script can help. The Font-Stack-Tester scans your CSS and puts an overlay on the page to allow you to remove the fonts manually. It's still in beta stages, and eventually it will be a bookmarklet, but right now it's pretty neat if you want to put the JS scripts into your pages for testing.
Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Font-Stack-Tester
By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com Guide March 7, 2010
Explore Web Design / HTML
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Pretty good idea. We attacked this problem through CSS. By being disciplined in the font stack declarations (the text is identical) we change and test stack orders with single global file changes. To assist this we have a set of commented stack declarations pre-prepared. The only places where this becomes more challenging is where we use specialty stacks (they do not conform to the general declarations).
Last week, after reading an article on sitepoint, I created a website using the script discussed here that allows you to test your page without having to put the javascript files in it. It is also very much in beta and has no real documentation but its worth a look. You can find it at http://fontstacktester.com – please use the contact form if you find errors.