Using custom fonts on a web page back in the dark days of the internet meant one thing… images. If you wanted to fill your site with the ever popular comic sans you had to fire up your favourite editor and knock out image after image containing nothing but text. If you wanted the titles to sit on top of a patterned background you were just asking for trouble. Fonts rasterised into GIFs do not look pretty, unless you add a tiny stroke around the letters, which takes a lot of time.

Fast forward to 2009 and the idea of a custom font on a webpage is still just a glint in the W3C’s eye. Fortunately there are some options available for those who don’t mind a bit of leg work.

Up until recently I have usually favoured sIFR, flash animations inserted into the webpage using Javascript. There are a lot of reasons for and against sIFR, it’s very flexible, well established and usually gets the jobs done. However, I have found that just recently the cons are outweight the pros. Pages which require larger amounts of text replacement become very slow (sometimes even crashing the browser) and the download penalty makes the entrance page extremely slow to load.

Luckily, someone pointed me in the direction of cufon. Yes, it’s still Javascript but this time there’s no flash (and no software to buy), the whole thing takes around 100k to download and is super fast at replacing text on the page. Cufon uses individual, dynamically generated images to replace each word of a title, allowing for word wrapping and as of ver1.02 it supports a huge range of css rules.

I’m not suggesting that cufon is the answer to all our (many) prayers but I do find myself very impressed.

Go check it out!