Comments on: Cufon vs sIFR vs FLIR

By: Ivan

Ivan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:59:21 +0000

In your artcile you said (“Internet Explorer 6-8 do not support font-face”) Actually Internet Explorer was the first browser to support font-face – its support comes since version 4 (or so). The only difference is that they use a different font type or simply a different format – .eot instead of ttf. There are already several online services (like http://www.kirsle.net/wizards/ttf2eot.cgi) that can convert ttf into .eot so support for font-face works well among most browsers.

the problem with font-face is that it doesnt look good when ClearType is enabled on win7 – it looks all jagged. But there are some possible solutions (http://allcreatives.net/2009/12/05/jquery-plugin-ie-font-face-cleartype-fix/)

By: Tom Sramek

Tom Sramek — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:30:22 +0000

Thanks for comparing them all.
I wrote a plugin that implements Cufon into Wordpress themes easily http://tomsramek.com/plugins/all-in-one-cufon/
I hope someone will find it helpful.

By: Zoe Blade

Zoe Blade — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:23:09 +0000

Regarding the con of Cufon “You can’t apply a hover state to converted text,” you can work around this using jQuery’s hover event. For instance, in the hover over function, use Cufon.replace with the hover colour, and in the hover out function, use Cufon.replace with the original colour again.

I hope this is of use to someone!

Thanks,
Zoe.

By: Phil Barnes

Phil Barnes — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:56:31 +0000

Does anyone know of any cases where a company has been approached for using cufon without license to the fonts?

By: Nate Tallman

Nate Tallman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:23:56 +0000

One quirk with Cufon is its built-in 10ms setTimeout before actually modifying the text. This is only problematic if you are doing some further computations with the modified text, especially when calculating based on element height/width.

By: Paul Irish

Paul Irish — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:32:24 +0000

Nice summary. I’ve done a bunch of research on these options as well:
http://paulirish.com/type/ Lots of slides and research here.

I’d add that Linotype’s current EULA allows use of Cufon with their web license, assuming you do the domain binding. And more and more are allowing it everyday.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:39:40 +0000

Good article, that’s what I’m looking for. thanks

By: Tim Gieseking

Tim Gieseking — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:36:26 +0000

Hey, stumbled upon this article while I was searching for reviews of Cufon. I know the focus of this article really isn’t @font-face, but this statement is a bit misleading:

“Internet Explorer 6-8 do not support font-face”

@font-face has been supported since IE4. IE only supports EOT fonts, not TTF or OTF, so you have to use a font that has both formats, or convert a TTF to EOT.

By: Roger

Roger — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:37:12 +0000

Looks like Cufón does support hover (since March). Furthermore, I am able to select text rendered by Cúfon or FLIR. Like Jeremy says, these techniques do not change the HTML itself, so the text is still there. Or did you mean something else when you say that Text cannot be selected?

By: Clay McIlrath

Clay McIlrath — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:31:18 +0000

@Jeremy, right you are my friend, when i wrote this post, FLIR and Cufon were both using techniques that did not degrade to clean markup (FLIR used actual images with alt tags for each letter, and Cufon used markup the rendered the markup unreadable to crawlers that support javascript). I have updated it to reflect the fact that all three of these solutions are SEO optimized now.