In this penultimate part of the series, I take a detailed look at the “bi” shorthand included with the Google Font API. It can be used as a replacement for the “bolditalic” option covered in a previous article. Since the function of the suffix “bi” is nothing but to query the API using a shorter and more compact syntax, its implementation should be extremely straightforward.
Google Font API: Using the Bi Shorthand (Page 1 of 4 )
Introduction
Among the variety of web services that Google has implemented in the last few years, there’s one that surely will catch the attention of many web designers like you. It can make your life easier when you're defining the visual presentation of text-based elements of web pages. Yes, as you may have guessed, in this case I’m talking about the Font API. This API is a flexible interface that will let you use for free a decent (and hopefully growing) number of commercial fonts in your (X)HTML documents, which can be easily customized by means of some easy-to-follow query string arguments.
Naturally, if you've already read the previous parts of this series, you now have a very good background in working with Google’s Font API. In those articles I explored different facets of the API, including its ability to download, either individually or at the same time, the italicized and bold versions of a given font family.
I left off the last tutorial explaining how to use the API’s “bolditalic” option, which can be used for getting the bold and italic versions of font styles with only a single request. This makes it easier to use the API without having to pass multiple parameters in the query string.
While it’s fair to say that using the “bolditalic” argument is a straightforward process, it’s possible to take advantage of the functionality offered by this argument in an even simpler fashion. As with other options covered previously, “bolditalic” has its own shorthand, called “bi,” that can be used to get the same results, but by means of a tighter and more compact syntax.
In this penultimate installment of the series I’m going to take an in-depth look at this shorthand, so you can begin using it when simultaneously downloading the italic and bold versions of a specified font family. Let's get started.
HTML 
