A short while ago I wrote about a new font replacement technique, Cufón.
In short: Cufón is an alternative to sIFR, which relies on both Flash AND JavaScript to work, but dutifully embeds the font into the SWF, so there are no issues with end-users stealing the font files you’re using. Cufón, however, uses the <canvas> element and JavaScript to create non-web-safe-fonts, but Cufón does expose the font files to the end-user, which could violate font licensing agreements.
I now stumble across an article that I imagine is mostly re-hash to us all, but also has three really interesting bits that caught my attention:
- “…at this time NO iPhone or, for that matter, Android phone can render Flash content”
- “Canvas… has excellent support in Safari Webkit”
- “Adobe’s position on their fonts: “All fonts produced by Adobe Systems can be embedded in Portable Document Format (PDF) files, as well as other types of files.”
So, does that nice little quote from Adobe mean that any font we own via PhotoShop can be used via Cufón?
The initial article I sent about Cufón had me upload the font file to the server and act on it there, which does mean end-users could grab the font and use it for themselves (effectively stealing that font).
This article, however, instructs us to upload our fonts to the “Cufón Generator” and “their generator will give you back a new JavaScript file”… It seems we no longer need to expose font files to end users!
Have a look at an example of a JS file produced by the Cufón Generator. I don’t pretend to know what most of that says, but it certainly looks like it is creating fonts, and this example page has NO @font-face…
Thoughts anyone??
Happy fonting,
Atg