Comments on: Cuddling With Cufón

By: Shelly

Shelly — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:56:50 +0000

Actually – I’ve seen the “can’t select cufon text” argument many times – it’s simply not true. You certainly *can* select cufon text, in any position, and just as easily as you can regular text. The thing is, you won’t *see* it being selected.

Usually, when you click-drag and highlight text to be selected and copied, it’ll turn “blue” so you can see it. With Cufon, you won’t see the blue – but it’s still selected. Go ahead and try it. It copy/pastes just like anything else.

By: Monthly Design Panel #1: Mostly about type on the web | Unmatched Style

Monthly Design Panel #1: Mostly about type on the web | Unmatched Style — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:30:13 +0000

[...] by Kyle Weems on CSSquirrel “Cuddling with Cufon” By “great alternative”, I mean that it “lights sIFR on fire, kicks it into an open [...]

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:33:48 +0000

@Scott – The nice part is that the extra spans are being generated by Javascript, which means that they’re being generated on the end-user’s machine, not on the server. So although this may impact processing time on rendering the page, it won’t impact the download beyond that of loading the script files. It’s worth noting that by comparison to sIFR, the end-user processing time seems much faster on rendering the font.

By: scott

scott — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:25:23 +0000

I’ve recently been tinkering with cufon and taking a look at the generated code it wraps the content in loads of spans etc, these are also seem to be done at the per word level so if you were to use it for main page headings this would be likely to increase the weight of the page.

Wondering what this would “actually” add to the speed of download if it were used throughout a site?

Any thoughts on this?

By: Janae

Janae — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:52:00 +0000

The text does copy when it’s selected. The problem is actually selecting it. If it’s mixed in with other text or you’re copying a whole page, say, then it works just fine. Trying to get an actual header by itself doesn’t work so well, unfortunately.

By: Kyle Weems

Kyle Weems — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:14:10 +0000

See, comedic rhetoric can never stand up to rational thought. :P

I hadn’t even noticed the text zoom issue, since pretty much all the main browsers do a full zoom now. I can’t see this impacting most people (who I presume will use the default zoom on their browsers), but then, I haven’t really studied user patterns for that kind of behavior to have a clue how right or wrong I am on that.

The text selection thing does bother me. If it’s just being used in headlines, the impact should be fairly minimal (you can select surrounding text around the Cufon block and get the Cufon text along with it), but for your average wall of text it could be really obnoxious (not that I think you should be using Cufon for a wall of text.) It looks like they’re planning on making this possible (http://groups.google.com/group/cufon/browse_thread/thread/affeef69c0bd648/705dc106180e79db), but sadly, I have no idea as to when.

Even with these problems, I think I prefer Cufon from a speed and no-plugin stance to sIFR. I’d prefer native font-embedding via something like @font-face even more, but thanks to all the usual piracy fears I doubt that most font vendors will even be ready to consider allowing it even once full browser support exists.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:50:26 +0000

Actually, it’s not as good as sIFR in two ways (at least; I haven’t done tons of experimenting with it yet):

1. You can’t select Cufoned text like you can sIFRed text.
2. You can’t scale Cufoned text like you can sIFRed text. (Try zooming text [not the whole page] on your text page.)

I expect they’ll fix both these over time, but for the moment, there are ways in which sIFR is superior.