I Need My Depression Fix
My best writing often seems to come with bouts of manic depression, anger, and other such symptoms of insanity. Seeing as I can't come up with anything to write, I must conclude that I am having a good day.
So I don't leave all my dedicated readers [snicker] without their fix, I've created a new category for nerd stuff, where I'll be telling you about all that amazing computer stuff that nobody can figure out. And my first nerd post is dedicated to: sIFR.
As a web designer, it's kind of annoying to have to use the default Micro$oft fonts for everything. It's fine for the main text on a page, but for headings, quotes, and other random pieces of text, it would be nice to be able to use a special font, sometimes. sIFR 2.0 is the solution for that.
Here's an explanation of how it works, blatantly ripped from: http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/
How it works
sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
- A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
- A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
- If Flash isn't installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you've designated as something you'd like "sIFRed".
- Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
- Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.
Looks interesting to say the least, but I have yet to test it.
hmm, interesting way of changing the text, I always just use flash …
abner
June 15, 2006 at 2:48 am
It sounds good, but I think it wont have future…
The CSS standards for CSS 2 and 3, have WebFonts included. The browsers will look for font urls specified in styles so that the machine loads them for that page in specific.
For now, i use low-size images, with alt text. The robots of search engines use alt text to know what the image is about.
Arathael
June 19, 2006 at 9:59 pm