I’ve just finished reading an excellent blog post from Cameron Moll about Cufon, an emerging technology for font replacement on the web.
At Bloom, we’ve experimented with using Sifr for font replacement, however, personally I always try to avoid using Sifr unless it’s an absolute necessity. It usually seems to cause me as many problems as it solves. In fact, I would go as far as saying I hate Sifr! I find it complicated to setup and time consuming to update. I can often be heard muttering expletives when I’m trying to get Sifr to behave properly. This is probably due to the fact that I’m a designer, not a developer.
Cufon appears to be as simple to set up as declaring a couple of scripts in the head, uploading a font file and adding a few lines of CSS. Even I could do that without furrowing my brow too much!
However, Cufon does have one major, major drawback compared to Sifr and that is font licensing. Cufon violates EULA (end-user licensing agreement) and copyrights due to the fact that fonts are uploaded or embedded.
Apparently, with a bit of jiggerypokery, unscrupulous characters can actually copy and download the font you have embedded on your site, the Type Foundries are understandably not happy about this.
Put simply, it would appear it is illegal to use Cufon for font replacement. This isn’t just a drawback, it’s a complete showstopper. However, towards the end of his blog post Cameron mentions that talks are ongoing with the powers that be and he is optimistic about sorting out the licensing and security issues. If this can happen then typography on the web will have made another huge leap forward.
Until then I’ll have to stick with Sifr and turning the air blue as I try and get the b*st@rd thing to work!
For a more detailed breakdown on Cufon, have a read of these:
http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/2009/03/cufon_font_embedding/
http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about
http://thinkclay.com/technology/cufon-sifr-flir
Pretty interesting stuff Stu – what are the major problems with Sifr? (I work in SEO remember I have no idea what you lot do in there
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I assume using your own font isn’t violating any EULA? What about free fonts?
Sifr isn’t really as bad as I make out, it’s actually a really useful tool if you have to have a certain font on a site i.e. brand guidelines demand that the corporate typeface is always used for headings etc.
They guys who developed SIFR deserve praise as it was a massive step in the right direction for frustrated web designers. It’s just a bit of a faff to implement and when you SEO boys start changing h2′s to h3′s and adding tags all hell can break lose!
My major issue with it is that if a site has loads of text being replaced with sifr, the raw html web text appears and is visible for quite a while before it gets swapped. If the fonts appeared instantly it would be fine but it can a bit messy otherwise.
What about @font-face? That would be my preference rather than fiddling with JavaScript!
@font-face also falls foul of the EULA.
Well I mean after buying the licence for the font/s, of course, or using free ones.
Is it ever so important that an exact font simply *must* be used on a web page? IMO, the design of any web site has boundaries imposed by the technology, not to mention the budget.
I am in the same predicament. Using sIFR for custom navigation font text doesn’t work as well as you would imagine. You are incorrect in proclaiming that a font can be saved and stolen to be used on other pages. The Cufon font generator lets you lock your font to a particular domain name.