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Another Stab at Online Outline Fonts

Posted by timothy on from the transportability dept.

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."

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. ironic by same_old_story · · Score: 3, Interesting
    this is kind of ironic actually.

    anybody that does lots of flash design will tell you, flash is a pain in the ass when it comes to type...
    granted, using your font of choice is great for design, and a huge improvement over html's font families, but flash has lot's of problems with text rendering, sometimes smoothing too much or sub pixel positioning quirks. these issues can be avoided, but still photoshop, for example, renders much better looking type.

    I guess when we get flash's new text rendering engineon the next flash player version, this will improve...

  2. a real challenge by CyberVenom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok, so who wants to one-up this and write a full-featured text-rasterizer in pure JS?

    I propose a JavaScript that can load a server-side TTF file (or OpenType or whatever) and walk the DOM, reading the CSS font name, and replacing the normal text with a rendering of the same in the specified CSS font, but rendered by the JavaScript instead of by the browser so it is gaurenteed to be done right. Of course, if the user has no JS, it will fall back to the CSS font names (which require the user have the font installed) and if the user has no CSS, it will fall back HTML 3.6 fonts.

    The wheels in my head are already turning...

    Oh, and before any of you leeches goes and patents it, I hereby declare prior art on the concept, so there!