Slashdot Mirror
Another Stab at Online Outline Fonts
orest writes "Microsoft took a whack at it with WEFT. Bitstream tried TrueDoc. But someone has finally gotten somewhere with sIFR. sIFR allows web designers to render font outlines -- and thereby their preferred fonts -- in a visitor's web browser, without those fonts being installed on the visitor's computer. sIFR relies on JavaScript and Flash to accomplish its magic. A similar, bleeding-edge solution exists in Batik, an open-source SVG browser from the Apache Foundation."
sIFR has come far enough to be used on major websites. Aside from seeing it in places like one of the website of the person who perfected it, it's also appearing on mainstream websites -- take ABC News. Their headlines are rendered using sIFR for browsers that support it.
"Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!" -- Montgomery Scott, ST:III
You don't have to have it enabled. It degrades gracefully -- if JavaScript is disabled or if the user doesn't have flash, regular text is displayed. That's the big advantage, and that's why it works well enough to have "arrived." Users who don't want JavaScript enabled don't lose any content, but users who do (a vast majority) see the page presented as the designer intended.
"Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!" -- Montgomery Scott, ST:III
I just checked out the website someone cited which uses this stuff, and ... well, maybe it's better than other attempts to do the same thing (like "put all text in a image"), but it's still pretty lame.
Like most other solutions to the "control-freak web designer problem", it seems better suited for a demo than for actual users. For instance, cut-n-pasting the text: it has some clunky emulation of cut-n-paste, but it's obviously an emulation, and doesn't integrate well with the environment. It also has the "flash capture" problem, where flash will grab mouse events you don't want it too -- e.g. if you're scrolling along with the mouse-wheel, and scroll past one of these dynamic font flash thingies, wham! your scrolling stops, as the flash instance grabs all the scroll events.
Morever, I think any technology which is being touted as a tool to give the designer more control over the fine details is a double-edged sword, as there are so many completely awful web-page "designers" out there, who are none-the-less still utter control freaks. If the technology in question still allows proper user control and overriding of the web-page, and integrates well with the user's environment (e.g.: css), then fine, but this "fonts as flash" stuff seems to be typically lacking in that regard (which is not surprising because flash itself is a major offender).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The above works better IMO as it uses plain old images to do the job (I dislike flash), plus the markup does need to inlcude these messy tags - it just uses the element text.
e.g.
where the generated img contains the text "Some Heading" in whatever font you use.ok, so there's a performance hit, but images are cached, so its only for the first viewing. The real beauty of it is you just have to chance the text and not worry about the font! Magic
Jaques