Making sIFR Fonts without a $600 copy of Flash

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.