dev: customized typography with sIFR
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
during the last few days I’ve been diligently working on a web-application in the area of print/typography, featuring a browser-based text-editor with support for various fontfaces. the main problem in realizing such an editor is the impossibility to load arbitrary fontfaces (besides the standards, like helvetica, courier…) into the browser.
sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), a free package of javascript, css and flash-code developed by mike davidson from newsvine.com, offers a unique solution for browser-based font-rendering. after loading a normal (x)html-webpage, a javascript-routine selects any number of marked DOM-elements (f.e. all headline-elements). the text-content of these elements is then replaced by flash-movies of the exact same dimension, rendering the text in any arbitrary font, embedded inside the movie. the whole process is instantly finished and runs hidden from the user. another big advantage: if flash is not installed or javascript is disabled, the browser displays all information in a chosen default-fontface. since all text is included in the (x)html-document, there are also no restrictions regarding search-engine spiders.
see sIFR in action: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/
