Using Cufon with BBC’s Glow JS library
You’ve probably seen Cufón before now – it’s a text replacement tool, which allows you to show pretty fonts on your website without having to use images.
It’s not packaged with it’s own CSS selector functionality, but it automatically detects other JS libraries – you can then use standard CSS to pick which elements on your page to replace.
This is actually a backward-compatibility thing – the latest browsers (IE8, FF3, Opera 10 etc) are able to use the core CSS selectors as it is – but anything before these require a bit of extra help, which is where the JS library comes in.
I’m a big fan of the BBC’s new Javascript library, Glow – it’s very easy to use, nicely accessible and comes with some clever widgets – but unfortunately Cufón can’t automatically detect and use Glow – which means FF2 and IE7 (and previous versions) don’t quite work.
So I’ve fixed it! Below is the latest compressed version of Cufón – converted to work with Glow. Download it and use it as you wish!
Download Glow compatible Cufon
I’ve emailed the Cufón guys to see if they’ll fix it in their latest release too.
Of course, if you spot anything awry or have problems, leave a comment or get in touch.
Update 02/11/09
I’ve just had an email back from Simo Kinnunen who’s going to put this code into the next release of Cufón (which I believe is coming very soon). Thanks, Simo!
Leave your comment below. Go wild! Just curb the naughty words.
I guess the Glow library isn’t well enough established yet, which is why Cufon isn’t able to detect it. Good work with the fix, you should tell the BBC guys too.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tom Haczewski, BBC Glow. BBC Glow said: taking a look at Cufón with BBC Glow http://bit.ly/4FHtoz (via @thehacksaw) [...]