sIFR – Taming Fonts Too Dangerous For The Web

Have a new design for your Web presence that doesn’t use standard Web safe fonts? Tired of boring old Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman? In the past, if you wanted to use fonts that weren’t Web safe, you pretty much needed to put the text into an image, like a GIF, to be sure that people would see your text the way that you intended. After that, changing text meant creating a new image.

Then came sIFR – Scalable Inman Flash Replacement – which essentially takes text and uses JavaScript to build it into a Flash movie (where it’s able to apply the font that you want). And, presto! A headline in Matura MT Script Capitals!

sIFR has been around for a while, and has cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. And the great thing is, if an end user’s browser doesn’t have the tools needed to display the sIFR text, a Web safe font alternative that you specify will be used.

Learn more about sIFR and its implementation.

Other Resources: - sIFR in Action - sIFR Font Libraries