Making sIFR Fonts without a $600 copy of Flash
I'm taking yet another stab at redesigning this site, though this time I'm just starting with a template from OSWD rather than from scratch. That's really helping on the graphic design front. However, given that a site like this is primarily text-based, I'd really like to have better font control than HTML usually offers .
That's where sIFR comes in. It uses Flash to do high-quality font replacement in web pages. While it doesn't really work for body text, this would be a way to use something other than the same 4-5 fonts we all end up using for headlines, pullquotes and other accent text.
I've mentioned sIFR before, but haven't ended up implementing it anywhere in production. Part of that was the conversion of a TTF font into the SWF Flash file that sIFR uses to work its magic. The Javascript/HTML part itself is relatively straightforward, but when the instructions for getting the font ready in the first place included launching the full version of Flash, I kind of lost my momentum.
However, now that I'm looking at a redesign, I wondered if there was another way to get the SWF from my existing fonts. Like most problems that exist for very long, there is indeed a solution.
The sifrFontEmbedder is pretty basic. You give it a TTF font file and it spits out the SWF for use with sIFR. You do need to download SWFMill as well, but other than that and sIFR itself, you don't need anything else.
I grabbed the tools and generated a copy of my LetterJ font that worked flawlessly on the test page. If you'd like the SWF, you can just grab it.
Now I can use any TTF font on my system. There are some pretty good candidates that are 100% legal to use this way on the 20 Best Free Fonts list and the fonts under the Open Source Font license are always a good place to start.
January 13th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Thx for the heads up on that embedder utility.
Like you, I've had sIFR dl'd for awhile (since last April) but haven't gotten around to using yet it either.
At least now whenever I do, you've just made it a little easier for me to get some usage out of it.
btw: I also had that 20 fonts link but inside it's actually 25 which I renamed it to in my delicious account, thus accounting for some initial confusion on my part.
Peace.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Thanks for posting this, I saw it before but forgot where. It's actually relatively straight forward to do this without Flash (I mean, compared to writing sIFR itself
so I'll probably build a tool for sIFR 3 as well.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
That'd be cool, Mark. I've got your site on RSS subscription, so I'll be watching for it. I really like seeing tools that make use of Flash without having to use it. To me, something that requires you either fork over $600 (given that you can buy a 3Ghz desktop machine with Windows installed for $280) or resort to piracy is frustrating.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:49 am
Thanks for the info. Just a heads up, but it appears that sifrFontEmbedder does not currently work with swfMill 0.2.12 but does work with 0.2.11 You can at least download the 0.2.11 version still.
March 7th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Your title caught my attention and yes it can be done and it works which is great. Thanks to Jeff for his comments on the swfMill versions. This site http://www.fontsmack.com/ has ready made sIFR Fonts if you don't feel up to making your own.
Thanks.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:21 am
I had seen FontSmack somewhere along the way, but couldn't find it when I was looking this time around. Thanks for the link. Most people would rather use a site like that to get their fonts than making them, even as easy as swfMill makes it.
March 30th, 2007 at 5:46 am
Any Idea's when the SIFR 3 Font tool will be available for use Mark?
Cheers.
January 13th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Very good info. Thanks for sharing this.