Comments on: MooTools FontChecker Plugin

By: Monkey

Monkey — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:26:35 +0000

No use? Why are you all talking about no use?

You can make excellent use of it! You use this to check if you want need a font-replacer like Cufon at all, by first checking if the browser is able to render the font-itself (either since it was pre-installed, or maybe since css @font-face works in this browser).

Refer to the excellent article http://kilianvalkhof.com/2009/css-xhtml/combining-cufon-and-font-face/

By: David Walsh

David Walsh — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:49:42 +0000

@olivier: This is more proof of concept than anything else. For each computer I tested this on, it returned the correct result.

By: olivier

olivier — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:18:05 +0000

Meh, I must agree with Jesus DeLaTorre on this one: while this is a cool trick, I don’t really see any use for it, since font selection is already handled by one line CSS. Unless you want to display a message that say “this site would look cooler if you had the font …” then what?

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:24:49 +0000

@Alan
This script does not give 100% true results.

It is just tries to see if the default font gives a text with different width than the new font you want to see the user haves on his computer.

If both font have same width with the testString, wich is not that hard, the script will give false results.

I don´t see any other way to test this dou…. In fact this is new for me.

Congratulations DW and the guy who created it for the first time.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:18:29 +0000

Internet Explorer and Opera showed different results than FF & Chrome. Any ideas as to why?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:06:48 +0000

Very cool. Thanks for posting this.

By: digital

digital — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:17:23 +0000

@Jesus: You’re right, but this is all I could think of heh

By: Jesus DeLaTorre

Jesus DeLaTorre — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:54:01 +0000

@digit you dont need javascript to do that

font-family: arial, “lucida console”, sans-serif

By: digital

digital — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:20:03 +0000

@Koen De Groote
I actually disagree. This plugin is super useful when you want to allow alternative font selections for your website, lets say you want the primary font to be A, but if the font is now allowed use B or C etc… with a simple manipulation of the code, you can get it done by loading different stylesheets that call the font family

I wonder if that made any sense, I’m too tired to type :)

By: Koen De Groote

Koen De Groote — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:22:28 +0000

Nice one, though I can’t think of any practical uses right now…

Still, fun stuff.