My activities have been going to other directions as [...]]]> After 3 years of absence from the tech-blogging scene I am doing it again. I’v been blogging about all things WordPress over at wordpress.designpraxis.at, where i used to maintain several WordPress plugins. So this post also functions as a landing page for redirects from there.

My activities have been going to other directions as you can see when looking around on this very site. So the topics I’ll be blogging here will mainly be on jQuery, Web-Development in general mostly related top front-end topics like CSS and XHTML.

To all of you, being asking what will happen to my WordPress plugins: You are welcome to take over development, just as April from springthistle is about to do with BackUpWordPress. Thanks April!

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• Ugly @font-face webfonts under Vista
• Web fonts finally

Reason is that I had turned of any fancy Windows Vista effects. Amongst these is the smoothing of screen fonts named ClearType. Unfortunately after enabling [...]]]> Today I wanted to have a look onto my @font-face webfont experiments under Windows and booted from my Windows Vista partition. And I was shocked. DejaVu looks just horribly ugly.

@font-face DejaVu without windows font smoothing

Reason is that I had turned of any fancy Windows Vista effects. Amongst these is the smoothing of screen fonts named ClearType. Unfortunately after enabling ClearType the result was smooth but ascenders are cut off.

@font-face DejaVu ClearType enabled

It took me some time to find a fix for this. The trick is to use a text-shadow with transparent background color:

.post {
text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px transparent;
}

Now the result, ClearType enabled looks like this:

@font-faceDejaVu, ClearType enabled and with text-shadow

Even with ClearType disabled DejaVu looks great now:

@font-face DejaVu, ClearType disabled plus text-shadow

The bad news is, that this is only true for chrome. IE7 doens’t support text-shadow. In Firefox DejyVu doesn’t render pretty. So ClearType is needed to help with this. IE and Firefox still cuts off ascenders, but I’m not giving up.

@font-face DejaVu Internet Explorer 7 ClearType enabled

@font-face DejaVu Internet Explorer 7 cut off escenders

Finally if found the solution: you need a special technique to generate your @font-face DejaVu from the original. Fortunately, fontsquirrel has an online @font-face-generator.

Another resource I stumbled across while hacking my @font-face implementation is the growing google web font library. Definitely a good start, when you don’t need something too special.

Related Posts:

• Web fonts finally

How come?

The problem is not [...]]]> Earlier in 2009, Internet Explorer 6 has been officially buried, even the Microsoft IE6 developer team sent some flowers, but from my point of view it has been buried alive. When deploying web-based frontends within large corporations you often still find Internet Explorer 6 and even below.

How come?

The problem is not an awkward Microsoft strategy, but the shortsighted solutions by the larger companie’s IT-departments. In order to get IE6 safe they patched thet piece of crap and now it has gone through so many security autits and patching iterations, that there is no way back. And since MS relies on that bigger companies as their valued customers, there is no end of lifecycle for IE6 even in sight.

Technologically there is no reason to still use IE6 and even IE7, but the whole process of hardening IE6 was so painful and took so many years that even Mircosoft was not able to sucessfuly announce the end of lifetime for IE6, last update on that issue beeing from Aug. 09 on the official msdn blog.

While popular services like Google Docs, Youtube, Amazon and others drop support for IE6, companies still require backwards client compatibility down to MSIE5 for their application services somtimes.

So what best practice should be applied?

At the moment we highly recommend IE7-js, which in the word of their developers

is a javascript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

And no worries: an IE8-js is on it’s way…

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Remember Mike Davidsons sIFR? That was amazing! And it happened in 2005 which in [...]]]> Gone are the days where GD and ImageMagick were the tools of choice to render text dynamically. I started to use my own php scripts in 2002 and used them up to 05. Menus only. Headlines of certain length only.

Remember Mike Davidsons sIFR? That was amazing! And it happened in 2005 which in terms of web development is Cambrian.

Unfortunately, if you were sitting on Linux, like me, where flashplugin was bit of a hack to get running, it was a blind flight. sIFR2 and sIFR3 improved that technique a lot, but without that flash plugin it was a nogo anyways.

In 2008, typeface.js offered an js canvas drawing solution. Font do look quite differently on different browsers unfortunately.

Since then I lost track a little bit. There are proprietary services like typekit, or open source solutions like cufon, conceived as an alternative to sIFR. But with HTML5, CSS3 and the like on the verge of becoming real I didn’t feel like trying those and spend days on debugging Internet Explorer 6 compatibility issues.

Now in 2009, snook wrote an article that shows how to become a font embedding master. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it until now and here, but today I gave it a try and use DejaVu @font-face embedded! BTW, jon tangerine has written about the history of web fonts.

Looks really good, even on my Linux machine, supports all browsers, except IE6 I think and doesn’t hurt :]

If you need fonts for embedding, webfonts is a good start. And if you allready know what you want, you can use the free service over at the online font converter, to get your *.ttf converted to *eot, *.otf, *.woff and *.svg.

Update: I just recognised and confirmed that Opera 10 is buggy with @font-face unfortunately.

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• Ugly @font-face webfonts under Vista