Sniffing over SIFR
It was a little over a year ago now when a buzz when through the design community – the age old problem of having to make your design work around web friendly fonts was coming to an end.
The word on the street was “sIFR is the new way”.
For those of you who just crawled out from under a rock and are wondering what sIFR is – sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in the typeface of your choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. (See: http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/What+is+sIFR).
It’s been a year now and while there have been fun times, there have also been hair pulling times…and maybe you are at the stage where you are wondering if the grass is greener on the other side.
But what is the other side?
Good news is that there are a few alternatives – here they are:
http://typeface.neocracy.org/
An unobtrusive library for using any font on a website. Unlike popular solutions like sIFR, typeface.js doesn’t require Flash and is 100% JavaScript. To use any font, upload the TrueType font file to a Web-based generator, and download the rendered JavaScript file and include it in your Web pages.
http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
Very similar to typeface.js, Cufón enables you to use any TrueType font in a website. Again, it converts the font to VML with a generator. After inserting the generated .js file in your Web pages, you can use the font like any other.
FLIR doesn’t require flash, it generates images from the server and replaces text.
Thanks for the correction! Have updated the article to clarify this.