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."

Comments

Anyone see a problem with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript has its uses and its abuses. For a lot of browsing, it's best to have it turned off. But what happens if you have to have it enabled just to read the text?

I wonder if it's a good idea to sacrifice security because a web developer is addicted to a certain font.

Re:Anyone see a problem with this?

[Niggle]

If you're running with something like Firefox's Flashblock extension then it doesn't degrade at all gracefully. You just get the usual click to play icon instead of the text.

I should add that whenever I install Firefox for somebody else, I always add this extension. 90% of flash on the web is used for ads that nobody ever wants to see. Most people are just amazed at how much it can speed up page loading.

Png?

[NotoriousQ]

And how is this different then just sending a png with the text. I guess it could then be dynamically sized -- but somehow I think that even Flash will have a hard time figuring out if I like my fonts triple sized.

Disabled people use computers too :(

[applegoddess]

Honestly, I think this is an excellent use of JavaScript (and the whole reverting to good ol' CSS if javascript is disabled thing). It gives control of layout to the designer, but you can't forget the disabled users. They exist, just like you and me. I volunteer to help blind people, and you won't believe what a pain in the !@#$ jaws for windows, voiceover for OS X and speakup for linux are when it comes to surfing the web...all because some developer wanted to use some font he/she liked and implemented that by using flash or putting some stupid image as a replacement (and often forget to include the alt attribute, which noone seems to really use *frown*).

I can't thank people like the sIFR devs enough for trying to make peoples lives easier.

Re:ironic

[jonadab]

> granted, using your font of choice is great for design

On the web, it's great for *bad* design.

On paper, it's different, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the users can't possibly substitute their own preferred fonts into a paper publication, so the only two options are for the creator to choose nice ones, or for the creator to choose ones that aren't very nice (*cough* Times), don't go well together, or cetera. But there's another difference: on paper, the text is rendered to a much higher resolution, which makes it practical to use some fonts that are a decidedly bad idea on the web -- script fonts, for instance, can be tastefully used in a print publication, but on the web, for the sake of legibility, you're pretty much limited to a basic serif font, a basic sans, or something fixedwidth, unless you're doing just one or two words (in which case, .png works okay). Anything else and you either have to set the point size so high it looks rediculous, or else the user's going to have trouble reading it.

This goes in exactly the same category as every other use of Flash: ways to gratuitously make the web uglier, while at the same time also making it harder to use.