Dynamo
9 replies to this thread. Most Recent
Anyone using sIFR Typography with Freeway?
A great little Flash-based technology that allows you to use any font on your site, whether or not the user has that font installed on their system. Better yet, the font remains searchable and accessible. It’s open source and I stubbled across it here:
[url]http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/[/url]
I figured I’d ask here if anyone has had Freeway success with this before I dive in any deeper. Could be cause for an action developer to jump on this (if an action would help).
Any opinions out there?
Hi, I had a bit of a go with it a while back, and have an Action somewhere.
A minor example can be seen here: [url]http://www.minibunny.com/theblog.html[/url] - the scrolly text is SIFR text.
I had a larger example which I need to dig out and see how it fares with more modern Freeways.
SIFR is great, but you need to "tune" the SIFR code to get the best out of it.
[EDIT] Try this: [url]http://www.actionsworld.com/sifr[/url] for a bolder experiment.
Thanks Paul! Is the action you came up with worth trying? I wouldn’t mind giving it a go if you’re willing to let people play with it.
Thanks for the links.
Hi, I have posted the Action here: [url]http://www.actionsworld.com/sIFRActions.zip[/url]
Unzip and place the resulting folder into your Actions folder.
The Action is a Freeway 3 refugee, and hasn’t been bundled up yet. In fact, a lot of how the Action works is still based on FW3 behaviour, so some experimentation may be needed. The Action is in beta, and so is not supported, but feel free to post comments - I do like to get feedback, and I would like to get this working in FW4.
A crash course in using the Action:
1 - You need to make your Flash files containing the font you want - see the SIFR web site for details on how to do this.
2 - Apply the Action to a page
3 - Define the style you want to use. This does not have to include the font you want to end up with (you could define a font set if you wanted to - just be sure to include web safe fonts in the definition too)
4 - In the Action Palette, open the first disclosure triangle. Select the Flash file in the drop down for your font in the drop-down.
5 - You can opt to select a tag, or type in your own style definition. This style definition should match that output by Freeway. The Tag selecting part is expecting Freeway 3 behaviour with my CSS Suite, so it may not work with Freeway 4. It is best to use the Type In Your Own Definition option. Use the style definition as output in the CSS by Freeway, eg: .BodyText
Note the leading "." - that’s important.
6 - You choose the colour of the text, and the background colour (which can be transparent if you select None).
7 - There are other various tweaks which are documented on the SIFR site if things don’t look quite right.
As I said, this is a Beta Action, and a Freeway 3 one at that, so it’s behaviour with Freeway 4 may be unpredictable. What I want to do is get it to match the tags and styles properly, and output Freeway 4 recognisable style definitions. Let me know of any issues or improvements you can suggest - this is an Action I’d love to use myself.
One final word of warning - don’t use this on text which occupies a lot of space on a page. It can slow down the browser’s rendering time. Best stick to headlines, pull quotes and captions.
Hi, I am wondering just how many font slots would be useful to an average user. 5? 10? 20? Remember - this is across all the pages that a Master could carry. Just need to consider how this would be handled in the UI (which I think I have got a bit too "clever" for its own good).
Hi, posted an update.
• The Action is now a bundle. Remove the previous Action AND the ~support folder before installing this version. • The Actions UI has changed a bit. I decided at the end to go for a limit of 20 items, rather than something more opened ended as it could get somewhat messy. As SIFR is best used for headlines and small bits of text, I didn’t think that this was going to be a problem. It’s also more Freeway 4 savvy now (as opposed to being a Freeway 3 Action beaten into FW4 service). • The Action sorts the calls for styles now, which should solve SiFR renderings in some situations
NB - some of these changes may affect sites that use the previous version of the Action.
[url]http://www.actionsworld.com/sIFRActions.zip [/url]
Enjoy.
Hi Paul, Just a quick question regarding your excellent sIFR plugin, if I may… I’m using it with Freeway Pro 5.1.1 and it seems to generate all of the required code apart from the links to the javascript file.
Do these have to be added manually, or should the plug-in do this for you?
Best,
Craig
HI, It’s a Freeway 3 Action which was tweaked for Freeway 4. I haven’t even looked at it in FW5 yet. It’s possible that something has broken. I just don’t know what yet.
No worries Paul, just thought I’d ask the question. If you ever do get time to look into it, I’d be willing to help test it out. Regards, Craig
