Does this use Photofonts?

hhp

I am guessing that they have a photofont-like tool. The difference is that their solution runs on the web and might be added to Adobe tools - whereas Photofonts have a plug in but as far as I know doesn’t have a web based implementation yet. I am sure Adam will know however...

Hi there!
We started looking around for every existing solution, but photofont tools and specifications did not meet our requirements.

We first developed the project for our own uses, but we now we really want to share because of the new exciting possibilities. But we will rather have an open-minded vision than a proprietary approach.

Will you tell us about the purposes/specifications that required this tool? Thanks!

The demo is very interesting. For good or bad, it seems to be loading a jpg image of the text into the browser, so it’s not really rendering the fonts locally. This might have some very interesting uses, particularly where one wants broad browser support and the ability to limit access to the text.

Our main goal was to achieve the chaotic aspect of a realistic drawing tool and the emotion of a human handwriting!!! So we skipped the vector approach (loss of detail, greyscales, no color and inappropriate existing tools). We also wanted to have an unlimited number of versions for each letter or ligatures. And since Opentype features programming was also a lot of pain, we went our own way, much easier one ;-)

Now, we can also add specific “behaviors” to fonts and letters (àla kerning pairs, special ligatures replacement, and new ideas too...), that do not exist on current font formats.

We have developed our own tools not only to work on print projects, but we are also porting the interactive editors to the web. You can try our first demos, so our system can easily be implemented in any existing website (no plugin). For more interactions between type and the user, there will be a much more flexible and playful version too...

Wow, this is sounding more & more interesting.

AIGA Voice has an interview with Franz Hoffman of Fontself:

The People’s Font, by Randy J. Hunt

Mr. Google turned up some links, as well.

Dude. That is fricken awesome.

This is cool, but, really, nothing new. Rendering text as images via a web server has been around for quite a while.

While this is fun, for true web use, it’s not ideal, as image based text just isn’t as accessible...which is a primary benefit of using the web.

That said, you could improve upon this a bit by making sure that you also render appropriate alt attributes for the images that are created.

Also, I’m thinking GIF files would likely be a better option for type.

BTW, the hand-rendered typefaces are lovely and I’m sure there’s a market for this.