PUBLIC MARKS with tag ifr

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set: 1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client 2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market 3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases 4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

veryone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.

Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón, which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set: 1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client 2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market 3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases 4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

Even though sIFR has been around for a couple years, many web designers have still never heard of it, let alone use it. sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) allows you to use custom typography on your site by utilizing JavaScript, Flash, and CSS. While most people simply create images when they need a custom-type title, sIFR can dynamically create short text blocks using whatever font you want (while still rendering the text with a default font on non-Flash browsers).

Life’s busy as usual, but it’s been too long since I last wrote about sIFR. Using the wonders of modern technology I’ve been writing and posting this from a train speeding towards Rotterdam, where I’ll be dropping by at the Xopus booth at ECM Plaza. Afterwards I’ll be going to a place-supposedly-unknown on a company holiday with Q42 and Xopus. (How cool is that, eh?! We’re hiring, too) So anyway, that’s just to tell you that I won’t be responding to questions in the next few days.

sIFR lets you use your favorite font on your websites by cleverly working with Flash, JavaScript and CSS. Here you'll find it's documentation and the FAQ. Leave a link to your implementation in the Examples!

Shaun Inman is the designer/developer responsible for Designologue, Mint and IFR. Originally from the Boston, Massachusetts area, he now resides in Baltimore, Maryland USA.

Mike Davidson on sIFR 2.0

IFR / FIR / IRT How to deliver rich typography using HTML/CSS/Javascript...

It’s been well over ten years now since the debut of the graphical web browser and we still don’t have an easy way to deliver rich typography using HTML/CSS. With CSS we can size, style, color, kern, show, and hide our text but we can’t deliver something classical typesetters have delivered since at least the 15th century: custom typography. Until now. In concert with Shaun Inman and Tomas Jogin, I am releasing into the public domain a scalable, multiline, Flash 6 compatible version of IFR to help you reduce the amount of browser text in your life and free the world from the scourge of Arial.

Inman Flash Replacement an FIR alternative