Coffee Cup Website Font 4.0 is one of a range of applications from the company that offers simple tools to manipulate Flash-based content. The product is available as a free trial, downloadable from www.coffeecup.com, with a $34 license fee beyond the trial period. Whilst this may appear to be a single function product, in reality it combines a selection of fonts as well as the sIFR Font Maker tool, which lets you convert fonts from your computer to SWF. You can then customize these fonts with a wide array of effects, including bevel, glow, and drop shadow.
sIFR is a technology designed to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in a typeface specified by the web developer, regardless of whether or not users have that font installed on their systems. This is achieved by using a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
1. The normal HTML or XHTML page is first loaded into the browser.
2. Within this page, a JavaScript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for the required tags, ids, or classes.
3. If Flash is installed, the JavaScript function tracks through the source of the page measuring each element designated to be rendered in Flash. If Flash isn’t installed or if JavaScript is turned off, the web page should degrade gracefully and display as normal.
4. Once measured, the JavaScript function creates Flash movies of the same dimensions as the original elements and overlays them on top, pulling in the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Flash’s own script language, ActionScript, inside each Flash file then displays the text in your chosen typeface with a size of 6 points and scales it until it fills the Flash movie.
CoffeeCup Website Font 4.0 provides sIFR generation facilities combined with font manipulation and a library of fonts. In practice, it is these facilities that will determine the value of this application for you, since CoffeeCup provide a free application to generate sIFR fonts, known as sIFR Font Maker. If you simply want to create sIFR fonts, this is all you need. If you want to manipulate your fonts and add a range of effects, then CoffeeCup Website Font 4.0 is a usable cost effective option.
