sIFR 3 Beta Released

On Monday, December 18^th, Mark Wubben announced the 1^st beta version of sIFR 3. Mark stated he feels this release is fit for widespread use.

For those who are not familiar with sIFR, here's a definition from the sIFR WIKI:

sIFR allows website headings, pull-quotes and other elements to be styled in whatever font the designer chooses - be that Foundry Monoline, Gill Sans, Impact, Frutiger or any other font - without the user having it installed on their machine.

The 3^rd version of sIFR is a major overhaul of from the previous version. The code was fully rewritten to take advantage of new Flash enhancements and provides the following features:

• Deployment is significantly easier than the previous version
• Better control of how the text is rendered inside the Flash movie
  • use bold and italics together
  • use different colors
  • support for leading, kerning and opacity, filters, blend modes and anti-aliasing.
• Better and easier font sizing, as explained in Font Sizing with sIFR.
• FlashCSS: This lets you use multiple colors and different text styles in general. It also aids with link styling.
• Controlling kerning, leading and line-height.
• Font resizing.
• Better FlashBlock support (actually this’ll be a side-effect of the font resizing).
• Possibility to ignore specific elements during replacement.
• Modification of the content passed to sIFR.
• Pixel fonts.
• Flash 8 filters.
• Background images inside the Flash.

Download the sIFR 3 beta to test the new code and to view the latest demo. You can also visit the live sIFR 3 demo.