I've been playing with this idea on and off for a month - this is where I'm at: http://battletech.hopto.org/experimental/dynafont/template.html Under the hood this works much like a font engine I wrote for a DOS program for the VGA card's 'Mode X' ages ago... Basically I have a array that contains some basic kerning info, use javascript to replace the contents of a section with one span for each character, then slide a single .png around to show each character. The kerning for the current character is added to the next character, which I then set the margin-right negative equal to the amount of overlap there should be. It works in IE, Opera and Safari, and while it works in FF on my desktop, I've had a few people report that the div's aren't rendering completely or at all on other machines. (firefux not working right? - I'm shocked... wait, no I'm not) If I could get some confirmation on it not working in FF with screencaps of it screwing up, that would be very helpful. (the two reports I have of it not working in FF both people ended up with corrupted screencaps that the whole computer - even their desktop was messed up - video driver error? - http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/4211/hurmzm6.png) Keep in mind this is WIP and the code has a LOT of 'clean up' needed - and I need to make it handle actually recieving HTML and such. I'm wondering if I can implement bold, italic, underline and strikethrough - the first two by making more images, the latter two by applying another span inside the letter ones. So... am I crazy to even be trying this, or does it look like something worth pursuing? True 'web fonts' are either a decade away or a decade behind us when it comes to being 'real world deployable' - and this COULD (with some more tweaking) fill that gap... Certainly better than that crap flash based method when it comes to accessability since it works from actual text on the page.
Heres your confirmation, if you still need! It appears fine on my side and identical in Internet Explorer 6, FireFox 2, and Opera v9. I think it's a really cool idea and it turns out really well. Keep at it I reckon!
i think that is a great idea, too bad that dont works with Opera 8.5 anyway,congrats for your idea! was so creative!
Bastard! Not the exact idea I had, but close Looks great though. Keep up with it. Any thoughts on license (dual license MIT & GPL is my recommendation)
I think it is an awesome idea. BTW, work fine in FF on my end... However, with the css '@font-face' on the horizon it might be risky business... most likely IE will take forever to implement it and FF might be a while... I guess I don't know what my thoughts are. It seems to be fairly well developed, so you might run with it and see where it takes you. Please note that my opinion is from someone with no where near as much knowledge as you and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Web fonts, gee, would designers want those? Hmmm, I dunno... duh. Drool! Make it a flawless script and people will purchase it for ridiculous amounts of money (until a few days later when the 12-year-olds start stealing it and distributing it). Though if the Flash method is used to cover actual letters, are you not still cool with accessibility?? Example <h2>s at www.geenstijl.nl The sIFR method? FF1.5 on Linux and 2.0.0.6 on Blows looks fine. Here's Konqueror (weird spaces): http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d136/schroedingerscat/Konqueror.png
It's fine if you don't mind the page taking two minutes to load on BROADBAND... (go for coffee at the convenience store down the street, get back and that site STILL isn't done loaded) Not that I'd ever actually see it since I browse with plugins disabled by default. sIFR is usually PAINFULLY slow, 'jumps' into existance after the page has already loaded, relies on plugins that might not always be available, etc, etc, etc... If it didn't suck so bad people might actually use it on websites that didn't suck.
Oddly enough I don't test 8.5 or even give a *** about 8.5 since that's going back two years on Opera releases - and there's NO good reason to not be running 9.23 - It's not like IE6 or even IE 5.5/5.2 where it might be the latest that's available (IE 5.2 mac is only IE mac, IE6 is the last verison to work in Win98/ME/2K) or the only browser available (Windows CE for example - try upgrading a CE4 device to IE7 - not gonna happen) Opera? Bite the bullet, download the four megs and some change.