I know this is perhaps an open-ended question, but I'm hoping some #font-face expert could give me some insight into a best-practice.
At this point in time, is it acceptable to use an #font-face embedded font for body text? I'm arguing with a designer and thinking no, because a FOUT could result in a big change in the layout of the content if a font takes a moment or two to download.
The question is - should I be concerned about the possibility of fonts taking a few moments to download and potentially causing a big shift in the rendering of the body?
Quite late, but here's my opinion: Your main concern with using font-face for body is not the loading time, but the rendering. There are only a (very) limited number of fonts that render well in all browsers and ios. Now, as long as the text is readable (small sans serif with good space between lines) and renders well, there is no real difference from a performance point of view (the font will only be downloaded once, and you can load it before you load your content to avoid any shifting).
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I can't find an answer to this question, when the browser takes an SVG from the cache does it re-compute the xml or not, does it store the 'IMAGE' that it has already created? (How?)
I would've have thought not, but then I've noticed how fast repeated svgs load.
I've also noticed slowness on a page logo (in mobile browsers) which make me think THEY re-compute the SVG, so i've moved to PNG's (which are obviously cached) for mobile to save a lot of computational work for the low end phones.
So maybe, does the answer depend on the browser / browser type / browser settings?
*my svg's are compressed svgz's by the way
Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. Most browsers go to some effort not to rerender things unless they have to. There is a buffered-rendering property in SVG 1.2 Tiny that may help if you're using Opera, other browsers try to do things automatically without requiring such hints though.
Browsers generally don't cache SVG content as a simple bitmap though. They do cache things like the absolute position and size of shapes and text with transforms applied, the css tree structure, gradients etc and then use this information they can redraw the content much more quickly than having to work it out each repaint. Such information allows browsers to copy with javascript and SMIL animation of parts of the SVG content as well as user scrolling.
What language or technology would I need to be able to create documents online? I want to be able to add text and images and move them into position, resize etc, similar to this.
And then when complete, create a PDF from them.
Sorry if this is a bit vague, I just need to know where to start researching.
You need to decide on your basic technology: Flash, Silverlight, Canvas, client-side SVG, server-side SVG or server-side bitmap. There are also commercial solutions that work with Adobe InDesign documents (and probably a host of other proprietary formats) but I'd expect those not to be cheap.
Flash/Silverlight require plugins, and are considered by some to be a dying technology - though I am sure that is disputed. Canvas is 'very HTML5' and is essentially a bitmap built/rendered on the client, but if you are ultimated rendering to PDF it may not provide the resolution you need. The same limitation affects building an image server-side too - you should probably be dealing with vector elements plus bitmaps, rather than rendering everything to pixels as you go.
That leaves SVG in my list, either on the client (see RaphaelJS) or on the server (see Inkscape). I'm doing some work with server-side SVG rendering at the moment, and it is promising; although subject to more scalability issues than client-side, it doesn't suffer from browser-compatibility issues or the limitations of browser rendering.
The biggest issue in browser SVG rendering is flowed paragraph text and text in/on a path - I am not sure how well these are implemented in modern browsers, or how much agreement there is between them. This is especially the case given that some of these require SVG1.2, and browsers (afaik) are only just settling on SVG1.1, after many years. But, if you just want to do standard blocks of text, bitmaps and vector elements, browser-based SVG should suit you fine.
The example you've given uses a server-side technology (SVG, or perhaps a commercial format) and renders to low-res PNG on the client.
In your case, once you've considered how to 'do the editing', you'll need to consider how to render to PDF, which will be done on the server. You could go low-level and use something like FPDF, use a report renderer like Jasper, or use a graphics system like GhostScript, Inkscape, Scribus, ps2pdf, svg2pdf etc.
Aside: I normally don't answer questions without obvious prior research. But, since you've indicated that you will indeed undertake this, I'm happy to help get you started.
I have a site that requires Trade Gothic. I'm wondering if it's better practice to use #font-face or cufon with a font that looks similar to Trade Gothic or just go the image route. Obviously, using images will look better but what is better practice? For example, is replacing header titles with images like below bad?
<h2><span>title here</span></h2>
span { display:none }
h2 { background:url(image.jpg);display:block;height:x;width:y }
It depends on the strictness of your requirement and browser support within your target audience, especially if you want to support mobile devices.
If using a similar-looking font is good enough, the requirement may really be a nice-to-have feature, so anything that degrades gracefully should work. #font-face seems the easiest to implement (just CSS and font files) and it doesn't require Flash or JavaScript (good for mobile users). Google Web Fonts is a great resource or you may even be able to create your own web font using a generator like this one.
You'll have to decide what works best for the majority of your audience and weigh in how flexible the requirement is. If you use a JavaScript-based solution and the audience has it disabled, is that a deal-breaker? Image replacement is not inherently bad, but it can be tedious to maintain if you have much content to worry about (especially if it also changes often).
I use both.
I like to use Cufon for navigation and/or main heading elements, because I think it renders better (specifically in Windows).
For any sub-headers and other text, I use #font-face, so that users may select the text.
I'm currently replacing header images with #font face, as they can load quicker, and text is always more SEO friendly, however you must be careful when doing this as this increases http requests which can then take longer to load. Also there are some legal issue as to which fonts can be used for web.
However it is especially ideal when no other font will do.
FYI browser support for #font face has been available since IE 4, as far as I know.
Well, the most obvious advantage that #font-face and cufon have against the image replacement method that you mention is that they generate your text dynamically and you don't have to create an image for each text that you want to replace.
Take a look here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/692990/sifr-vs-cufon-vs-typeface-js
I'm building an interface with a lot of info on the screen.. dozens of inputs, with accompanying labels. as a result of the volume of info the fonts have necessarily become pretty small.
but I'd like this to be as readable and usable as possible.. is there a really nice font that's both readable and compact, that works well in a browser (specifically in this case, IE7) ?
anyone have any other tips to sort this out? is there some specific combination of pixel/em size and font, or some other CSS voodoo that can help me out?
this is an intranet app so we actually can be pretty specific.
any suggestions appreciated, thanks.
To have it resized cross browser, use ems. Set your font-size on body element to be 62.5% to make sizing ems clearer. 1.2em = 12px.
Arial is pretty good font. So is Helvetica.
Do you keep accessibility in mind? Isn't it possible to redesign the interface so that less information is shown and people with less than 20/20 vision can easily read your pages?
Typically, sans serif fonts are more readable when used with small sizes. If you want to use a monospaced font, I personally quite like Vista's 'consolas' font.
According to this post from 2006:
http://www.kathymarks.com/archives/2006/11/best_fonts_for_the_web_1.html
Tahoma could be winner:
"Tahoma (Windows). Tahoma was designed especially for legibility on the screen. It's preloaded on Windows systems. Similar in style to Verdana, it is narrower and more condensed"
See here: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
Does anyone have any experience or remarks about this javascript? Is it worth including? Do you recommend it?
I know many people, myself included that are using various IE hacks to get transparent PNG support. THis looks like a little bit more help, and as long as it works, and the size is fairly small, I wouldn't see much against using it.
I've used it before, and my results are mixed. Those scripts cause IE to churn for a bit on page load. Basically, you have to think of it as iterating through Elements and stylesheet rules to apply "fixes" for areas that are deficient in that particular rendering engine. In some cases, depending on how complicated your markup or stylesheets are, that can take a bit of time and you will see the browser hang.
That said, if you can trade off that performance cost, you will save development time as you'll spend less time hacking around IE6 quirks; IE7/IE8 will provide enough missing functionality that you can avoid certain edge cases, can develop using standards better (min-width/min-height, multiple className selectors, etc.), and certain rendering issues will disappear.
However, if you just need 24-bit transparent PNG support, use a tool built for that. Including IE7/IE8.js for PNG support alone is like pounding in a nail with a tank. Use DD_belatedPNG for that.
It works, but its worth keeping in mind that ie7.js and ie8.js do much more than provide transparent PNG support. Even with the transparent PNG support, its worth keeping in mind that transparent background images cannot be tiled (repeated) using background-repeat or positioned using background-position. This hinders any ability to use CSS rollovers using background-position. I've only used it on one site I've done, and now that I'm updating the site I can't remove the ie8.js because if I do the entire website breaks layout in IE. I don't believe I'll be using it in the future, and instead rely on simple CSS hacks or simply allow my sites to "degrade gracefully" in IE6.
I know that there are some tools for fixing the transparent PNG problem which are more flexible than this. For instance, the jQuery plugin ifixpng2 will support background position, which ie7-js doesn't do.
As long as you are aware of exactly what it fixes, I would say go for it. I'm not sure about this lib exactly, but some libs get very expensive if you have a large DOM, as they tend to hook in HTC file base behaviors on EVERY DOM Element. This causes the dreaded "Loading x of y" status bar message to flash constantly on the initial load, and any newly generated DOM content.
well its beautiful and works grate way u can use cs3 features like li:hover. we did lost of project last time using ie8.js and it works great way.