Cufon

TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:49:04 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE




Cufon [Simo Kinnunen] Free software published in 2009 to render text in a font of one's choice. Developed by Simo Kinnunen. From the announcement: Cufon aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set: No plug-ins required - it can only use features natively supported by the client Compatibility - it has to work on every major browser on the market Ease of use - no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases Speed - it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text Cufon consists of a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript. In reality the generator is little more than a web-based interface to FontForge. First, the generator builds a custom FontForge script based on user input and then runs it, saving the result as an SVG font. The SVG font is then parsed and SVG paths are converted to VML paths. This is a crucial step in achieving stellar performance in Internet Explorer, as it supports VML natively. The resulting document is then converted into JSON with a mix of functional JavaScript. This has numerous advantages: To include a font, you only need to load it with the standard tag as any other JavaScript file and it will be registered automatically There is no need to manually parse the file on client-side again External JavaScript files block execution until they have loaded, which helps us to achieve a flicker-free, clean replacement It compresses extremely well. While often somewhat large in terms of file size without any compression, a compressed font usually weighs in 60-80% less than the original. Tutorial by Jeffrey Way, who argues that Cufon beats sIFR in simplicity and ease of use, but warns that text is not selectable and that the hover element does not work. Alternate URL.	EXTERNAL LINKS Cufon MyFonts search Monotype search Fontspring search Google search INTERNAL LINKS sIFR fonts ⦿ Fonts and HTML ⦿ The Finnish type scene ⦿ SVG typefaces ⦿

Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html