Using Unsafe Fonts for Web

Steve Swift wrote:

[dorayme wrote:]
If it is a heading, and you wanted fancy,
why would you do your one char per cell instead of making a nice
heading in Photoshop or Illustrator and exporting as a gif or png? Or
not at least putting a set of chars that make a word into a cell
(given your penchant for cells)?

Because my page supports millions of people, all with different names,
and puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)
but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

Generating GIFs of complete names on the fly isn't hard, and that
would let you typeset them properly (kerned, with ligatures, etc),
rather than lumping them into separate cells. And since browsers would
cache them, you wouldn't have to regenerate the GIF for refreshes, so
rendering would be faster on subsequent requests.

On a reasonably fast server, a CGI script that whacked the name into a
LaTeX template, ran it through pslatex, and rendered the output to GIF
with Ghostscript would probably suffice.

But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

--
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University

On 4 Jun, 09:04, Steve Swift <Steve.J.Sw... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

my page [...] puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)

The "John Bull printing set" approach. It works, but you lose
kerning. It's OK for ransom notes and OCR A, but for any "aesthetic"
use of a typeface the amount that you've lost will far exceed any
possible benefit of selecting the starting font.

By the time you've mangled it through this process, it'll look worse
than if you'd just specified Comic Sans in the CSS.

but to do the entire header in a single GIF would require a new GIF for
every distinct name I encountered.

That's a trivial bit of code, which you've been able to download as
ready-built PHP for something like 10+ years now. Fear of bitmap
generation code is no excuse.

On 2008-06-04, Andy Dingley <dingbat (AT) codesmiths (DOT) com> wrote:

On 4 Jun, 09:04, Steve Swift <Steve.J.Sw... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

my page [...] puts their name in the page heading. I can manage this with about
70 small gifs (Upper Case, Lower case, digits and some puntuation marks)

The "John Bull printing set" approach. It works, but you lose
kerning.

Most browsers (Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9) don't do kerning anyway. But
they do support proportional fonts.