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

jQuery Sparklines. Delightful Sparklines implementation, using canvas or VML in IE. A neat nod towards unobtrusiveness as well: you can specify your data as comma separated values inside a span, then use a single jQuery method call to convert the span in to a sparkline image.

# 27th February 2009, 8:43 pm / gareth-watts, graphs, canvas, javascript, jquery, sparklines, vml

typeface.js. Outstanding hack—renders custom fonts using VML in IE and canvas in everything else, using fonts that are defined as a set of vector paths stored using JSON.

# 27th October 2008, 11:45 pm / fonts, typefacejs, canvas, javascript, json, vml, typography

Create cross browser vector graphics. An accessible introduction to dojo.gfx, a powerful 2D drawing API built on SVG and VML.

# 20th December 2006, 12:42 am / svg, drawing, dojo, 2d, vml, javascript