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Lettering.js - A jQuery plugin for radical web typography. (letteringjs.com)
132 points by _b8r0 on Dec 13, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


This is one of the linked example sites:

http://www.danhigbie.com/

Firebug says the font pack from Typekit is over 575kb. That's a lot of bytes to add to your pageload, and (in Firefox at least) it causes noticeable page redrawing as the font files are loaded.

So, while this is neat, I'd probably still go with a simple png file for things like site logos.

(I realize this is more of a critique of Typekit than the jQuery plugin; the plugin itself comes in at under 1kb.)


No redrawing was observed while viewing in Chrome 9.0.597.16


Webkit based browsers don't show the text before the @font-face font is loaded. You can achieve the same effect in Firefox and Opera by using WebFont Loader: http://24ways.org/2010/using-the-webfont-loader-to-make-brow...


And if you're serving pages to the other end of the world it becomes prohibitively slow. I waited about 30 seconds for anything to show up on the page.


Great stuff! Now all we need is good sense of typography in people who are going to use it. Or this is a weapon of visual noise in wrong hands.


Personally, I much prefer Cufon -- http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/. It has less features, but works much better for basic typography.


Cufon is great, but this something for manipulating individual characters.


we used cufon for the last few years. looking to switch now since google preview doesn't support canvas and you end up with screenshots with no text


typeface.js > cufon


Too bad this breaks the fundamental rule not to us JS for basic layout. Rules are meant to be broken, but still…


Not really, all this seems to be doing is programmatically adding spans with classes around letters/words/lines. The layout is still being specified in the CSS.

I don't think it's really violating any 'rules' as much as just providing a bit of convenience.


"★★★★★ L@@K!"

That's some recommendation there!

But seriously, this neat, I just worry this will be abused.


The font they chose for the body text looks horrible in Chrome.




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