Simon Willison’s Weblog

cufon. A promising alternative to sIFR, cufon uses VML on IE and canvas on other browsers to render custom fonts in the browser. You have to convert your font to JavaScript first, either using their free hosted tool or by installing the FontForge based server-side script yourself. The JavaScript encoded font file uses VML primitives to improve IE performance; the JavaScript library converts that to canvas calls for other, faster browsers.

# 6th April 2009, 10:29 pm / cufon, browsers, fonts, vml, ie, fontforge, sifr, typography, canvas, javascript

Facelift Image Replacement. Like sIFR but with JavaScript and a PHP text rendering component. I question the need for the JavaScript if you’re already generating the images on the server, but the actual generation script is nicely done—it makes smart use of ImageMagick and caches the generated images.

# 5th August 2008, 6:36 pm / php, imagemagick, facelift, imagereplacement, sifr, javascript, caching