Like many other web professionals, I’m tired of the limited font set we have to work with. Gee, should I use Verdana on this site or Georgia? Maybe Arial? Meh. Bor-ing.
The merits and legal implications of CSS3’s proposed @font-face are being hotly debated, which means the proposal is going nowhere fast. Unfortunately, this also means we won’t have native browser support for a wider set of fonts anytime soon. In the meantime our sites (and e-learning courses) will continue to use the same old ho-hum fonts.
Are there any other options? The answer is yes, but none of them are perfect. The most common (and cross-browser) solution is to use what’s referred to as the image-replacement technique; the basic idea is to use a program like Photoshop to create an image containing your text in a nice font, then display the image instead of the original HTML text. Since this requires making a custom image for every line of text, it’s generally only used for headings. Chris Coyier wrote a nice article on the topic about a year ago, and rounded up the most popular techniques at the time.
Some enterprising developers have come up with alternative image replacement techniques that are quite impressive. The most popular (by far) is sIFR, a Flash-based solution that can replace any specified text on your page dynamically, using small SWF files. This solution doesn’t require custom images, is cross-browser, and is extremely flexible. Alas, it also requires JavaScript and Flash Player; if used for a lot of text on the screen, you wind up with a bunch of SWFs floating around, which definitely eats up CPU cycles and slows down older computers.
More recently, there have been interesting attempts at using SVG, canvas, and VML to draw fonts dynamically. One early implementation of this was typeface.js [link no longer available], which appeared to be a great idea but was difficult to use. More recently, Cufon has been getting a lot of buzz. I think it’s very nice and is easy to use, but it also has a few drawbacks, namely what happens if CSS is disabled in the browser.
Any text generated by Cufon (and some similar scripts) is treated as an inline image — canvas elements are functional equivalents to images. The original text is hidden using CSS. If CSS is disabled, the original text shows up side-by-side with the generated text. This causes all sorts of problems.
Another drawback is selectability; Cufon and other canvas/VML-based systems have problems making text selectable in all browsers. To be fair, this is a problem with just about every image replacement technique except sIFR, which uses the power of the Flash Player plugin to get around the issue.
I’d like to be able to harness the creative possibilities of typography in my e-learning courses but really wish I didn’t have to jump through all these hoops to do it. Which system will I wind up using? Probably a combination of old-school static images created in Photoshop and sIFR. I feel that sIFR is the best option for my projects because of its greater accessibility and flexibility, but only when I know my target audience has Flash Player. I’m also very impressed by Cufon and hope they manage to take it to the next level to be on-par with sIFR.