Thursday, 29 January, 2009
Lavoisier
[UPDATE: Lavoisier now has bold, italic, and bold-italic versions. I've created a page where you can always get the latest/greatest version: The Lavoisier Page.]
Lavoisier is a free, open source font. Feel free to download it, use it, embed it, tweak it, whatever you want. You can play around with the source file if you have FontLab. If you make a change that you think is valuable, let me know and maybe I’ll incorporate that change into future releases. Meanwhile, I’m distributing it under the SIL Open Font License. Please let me know if you have constructive criticism, or if you use the font to create something cool. Thanks!
Thursday, 29 January, 2009
Rasta and Revolt, oh yeah. (Rasta’s “RA” just might be the first time I understood what a ligature is.) 86th and Broadway. I can almost smell the stale subway air wafting up the stairs…
Wednesday, 28 January, 2009
Great post over at Smashing Magazine about web typography. Scattered through the article are a bunch of sIFR-based, and quasi-sIFR techniques and plug-ins. I just finished playing around with some of them.
TTFTitles WordPress Plug-In: Works beautifully. The plug-in allows you to set up styles to be applied in your WordPress templates, and then generates PNG files on the fly based on your style and whatever TTF fonts you have uploaded in a special folder. The unfortunate bit is that you have to have fonts sitting on your web server, which opens up the Pandora’s box of piracy. And, of course, unlike sIFR, you now have images instead of text on your web pages.
Font Burner: Basically, this is sIFR for the technologically-impaired. The site has a collection of sIFR-ized fonts, and the code to be able to use them. Just find a font you like, copy the code, paste it into your web page, and you’re done. The problem is that the code you’re inserting points back to the Font Burner website. So if their site is down or changes, you’re screwed.
JQuery sIFR Plug-In: I’m excited about this one, and as soon as I’m done posting this, I’m off to try it. I love the idea of integrating sIFR into this revered JavaScript library.
Other Text-to-Image Packages: typeface.js, facelift, PHP + CSS Dynamic Text Replacement (P+C DTR).
Wednesday, 14 January, 2009
Johno has published my article over on iLT! (Debate rages on about whether or not they should be called “metrics”…)
Monday, 12 January, 2009
Well, this is old news (2007), but I just stumbled across a version of sIFR that doesn’t require Flash in order to create Flash font files. It works with the wonderful swfmill, a project central to the open source Flash development community.
Check out opensIFr. It works really nicely, albeit only with True Type fonts.