Latest writing

More fonts for the web

Posted on May 11th, 2010 / Comments: 0

Typography for the web is on the roll.

Sites like fontsquirrel and fontspring offer loads of free and open-source embeddable fonts for hosting on your own server, and hosted solutions like typekit.com are partnering up with big type foundries like fontfont and veer.

The big foundries have been a bit slow in adapting their font licenses for this newfangled technology; after all, the MS-proprietary format .eot has only been around since IE5 or something.

Monotype, Linotype and ITC have recently joined forces in a service similar to Typekit called webfonts.fonts.com. This is great news, since beforementioned foundries holds classics like Frutiger®, Univers®, Helvetica®, ITC Franklin Gothic and ITC Avant Garde® to name a few…

I got my beta account invite to the service day before yesterday and have just started toying with it a bit. The UI is a bit lacking when compared to typekit, and many of the poster-name fonts mentioned on the site hasn’t been added yet. Font replacement looks snappy enough however. Think I need to play around a bit more with the service before I can give an honest opinion.

subscript/superscript character challenges in HTML

Posted on September 16th, 2009 / Comments: 0

(this entry is a bit of a mess, just posting it for reference now, might get around to expand the topic at a later time)

According to the internet, IE has issues with the UTF-8 version of subscript 2: CO₂ … which unfortunately turns out to be correct, also in IE8. IE just displays an outlined square.

when writing m², you can either use the entity &sup2; or <sup>2</sup>. There is no entity for subscript-2 and the UTF-character &#8322; doesn’t work in IE Without some extra CSS in the document they differ a bit, &sup2; being more typographically correct. <sup> and <sub> elements messes up the line spacing.

Examples (entities vs. sup/sub): m² vs. m2 and CO₂ vs. CO2

Related info:

Extra characters for Cufon/sIFR

Posted on July 27th, 2009 / Comments: 5

When rendering typefaces for use with Cúfon or sIFR, it’s not enough with choosing basic latin if you want to be able to write in swedish or danish. Here’s the string I’m using for configuration:

“”‘’…_&-–—åäöæøàèìòùáéíóúâêîôûäëïöüãõñçÅÄÖÆØÀÈÌÒÙÁÉÍÓÚÂÊÎÔÛÄËÏÖÜÃÕÑÇ©®™′″´×⁺
That tends to cover the most common issues, including WordPress punctuation.

How to make it work

Adding extra characters when rendering font files for Cufón is fairly straightforward; just paste that string into the text field labeled “.. and also these single characters” and render away.

When generating .swf-files for use with sIFR, select the text object in the .fla file that comes with the download, 2) click the character embedding button, and 3) paste the text string in the field. Generate the .swf, and done!

cufon-and-sifr-characters

MP3 Amp

Posted on October 16th, 2008 / Comments: 0

I’ll take two, please.

mp3Amp

Herb Albert – Spanish Flea

Posted on February 7th, 2008 / Comments: 0

This song has been going around like the flu in the office the last couple of months. Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass… Here’s what has to be the funniest interpretation ever of it: