Title is really weirdly worded, and it's not necessarily OP's fault; the article itself is poorly worded, and it shows in the confusion from the first few comme

Title is really weirdly worded, and it's not necessarily OP's fault; the article itself is poorly worded, and it shows in the confusion from the first few commenters. Google Web Fonts have always been available offline; when you start browsing the web fonts and then add one to your "collection", you should be able to find a link that says "download your collection". That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is by accessing the font repository on Google Code, which is not new and has always been around; the fonts are stored in a Mercurial repo. This is mentioned in a link near the end of the article. The point of this article, and what isn't really emphasized even though it should be, is that (apparently, I haven't used it) this SkyFonts tool keeps the fonts updated on your local machine. This might seem like a silly feature, but I can tell you from experience that the Google Web Fonts do actually update pretty frequently; not just new fonts getting added, but existing fonts will also receive updates. Having to pull down the deltas on the hg repo and then reinstall all of the changed fonts manually when you're using a large subset of the library is not a trivial task.