Sistr: Rich Accessible Typography in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:50:00 GMT

Filipe Fortes released a preview of Sistr, a script which will scan your html and provide a rich custom font overlay if you have Silverlight installed. Very cool. You can check out the side by side demo here.

Not only is it nice to have font choices other than the base web fonts, but this also leads into possibilities for better accessibility and search engine optimization. I've been thinking through this overlay concept for a little while, but its great to see someone take the time and do something with it.

Another cool thing about the sistr.js script is that in order to use custom fonts it takes advantage of the downloader capability to select files from within a requested .zip file.

var downloader = plugin.createObject("downloader");
 downloader.addEventListener("Completed", function(sender, args)
{
 textBlock.setFontSource(sender);
 });
 downloader.open("GET", "Colwell|fonts.zip");
 downloader.send();

The Silverlight SDK blog has a great post on Downloading Fonts Using the Downloader Object with a full explanation on how this works.

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'fonts'

Sistr: Rich Accessible Typography in Silverlight