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General Talk: sIFR help

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    Alright, I'm working on TF v5, it looks amazing so far.. As you can see, the headings use a font you guys probably wouldn't have on your computers. I have looked at all the websafe fonts... None of them look good so I need to figure out a way to get that font for my headlines. I tried google and the only solution I had was sIFR... I've been aware of sIFR for a long time, but I didn't know it required you to be able to access flash pro...

    If you know of a better alternative to sIFR please post it.
    More importantly though, is there anyone who has a copy of flash handy that can help me out? I'll add you on msn I just need one thing changed in one file...

    Thanks,
    Sean
    • CommentAuthorRob
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2008
     
    What you could do and something i've just done on a store (I can't show you yet it goes live in the next day or two) is to have a php file which generates the image based on the font you're using, you put the font on your server and generate the heading dynamically via something like domain.com/title.php?My_Title_Here

    You could then .htaccess it to redirect from my_title_here.gif and then it'll look to anyone in the outside world that you've created a .gif for every single header on your site without actually having done so.

    If you're unsure how to do it I could copy and paste my code here but I don't have the time to write a proper tutorial unfortunately (I don't think i've seen anyone else writing about it either unfortunately)
    • CommentAuthorRob
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2008
     
    Sorry to double post but have you looked at this? You can often find good alternatives for different machines.

    http://www.apaddedcell.com/web-fonts

    At the least it could give some inspiration :)
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    I could have done image replacement but I want text/font replacement, so it is search engine acessable, SEO friendly and people can select the text.
    • CommentAuthorRob
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2008
     
    Fair enough on the selectable point, but wouldn't alt tags make it just as seo friendly? Or do search engines treat standard text as more important than alt tags?
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    If there is only 1 or two images on a page I think alt tags carry more weight. But with many of them, which would be the situation if I used that technique for headers.
    More importantly though, I want to use this for my topic headings, so the H2 tag, which is weighed higher than alt tags and text.
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      CommentAuthorgreg
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2008
     
    i believe if you place your image within header tags, the alt text will carry as much weight with search engines as it would if you just had that text inside a header tag. it's semantically correct, seo friendly, valid html.

    also i'm pretty sure alt tags carry the same weight as regular text, regardless of how many images you have on a page. but don't quote me on that.
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    Sean, have you tried something like sIFR Font Embedder / OpensIFR / Convert TrueType Font To sIFR Flash File?

    If none of those work shoot me an email and I'll convert the font for you.
    • CommentAuthorcmawhorter
    • CommentTimeJul 29th 2008
     
    I've created an alternative to sIFR that you might find useful. It generates image versions of text on the fly (and caches them) and then automatically replaces the headers with javascript.

    This way, all text is still available to search engines and ppl using text browsers etc. You can take a look at http://facelift.mawhorter.net/

    If you need help getting it setup with your design let me know. (You could leave the dashed border and still have the text overlay on top of it.)
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      CommentAuthorgnome
    • CommentTimeJul 29th 2008 edited by gnome on the 29th July 2008 at 16:12:55 EDT
     
    cmawhorter: the only thing yours really lacks (in my opinion) is the ability to select the generated text. It still looks like a great product.

    Edit: You might want to modify the zip file a bit: zip it up in a directory, so that it doesn't just dump the files wherever they are extracted.

    Second Edit: having explored it more throughly, it seems to be firefox-only, it requires PHP, but it should be quite speedy after initial generation the first time any given header is seen. For me it is good that it isn't flash-based, since I cannot easily edit flash files.
    • CommentAuthorcmawhorter
    • CommentTimeJul 30th 2008
     
    @gnome

    I agree about the generated text... but IMO this is a browser pitfall. I think if you highlight an image and copy it, it should put the alt text in the clipboard.

    You're right. I'll definitely do that with the zip file. I dislike this method personally but I think i'm the minority.

    It's not supposed to be firefox only...? What browser are you using that is having problems? I've tested the home page with many browsers using Browser Shots (.com) and for the most part, they all looked good. I did just update the code a bit and that might be what's causing problems.

    You are right, it does require PHP with GD enabled (the newer the better). Sorry I didn't mention that in the original post.

    Thanks for looking at it and for posting back.
    • CommentAuthorRob
    • CommentTimeJul 30th 2008
     
    Does facelift work in IE6? And what about on different backgrounds, in particular image based backgrounds that are fading?

    On a store I worked on recently we simply used a dynamic php file to create the image and then used htaccess to mask it as being a gif file.

    But we had alot of problems tmaking it work both on backgrounds and in IE6 as originally we used transparency but obviously IE6 doesn't like that to much so eventually we ended up making different types for each background and having to put special characters in the text to determine what type of background it was. Which made the code quite messy, if this works it could be a simpler solution, although it wouldn't look as good with javascript turned off, which has been a bit of an issue with the customer.
    • CommentAuthorcmawhorter
    • CommentTimeJul 30th 2008
     
    @Rob

    Facelift does work in IE6. It works by generating a transparent png and then uses the AlphaImageLoader filter trick to make it transparent in IE <7. It will work over a faded background. You can see an example on the Examples page at the website.

    I think I am seeing the problem that gnome reported. For some reason IE is reporting an 'Unknown runtime error'. This didn't happen in the previous version so I will be making that version available for download until I can sort out the problem.

    I can understand that. IE6 (and IE in general) has taken years off my life... I think more than smoking. You are correct, if Javascript is turned off then you will see the plain HTML text version. I suppose you could use facelift to hack together a script that would replace the images before it is sent to the browser. But then you'd have problems with people having images turned off.
    • CommentAuthorRob
    • CommentTimeJul 30th 2008
     
    I don't mind using javascript its more that the customer made a big deal about it working with js turned off, then again I don't think he'd mind sacrificing a bit of the sexy look if js was turned off, after all the product page hardly looks great without js.
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    I just wanted to apoligize to SeanPollock for accidently hijacking his thread. I'll start a new thread about this.

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