Cufón is one of the solutions available to force browsers to display a page with non-default fonts. Here are 5 tips for using Cufón, based on real-life experience:
- Don’t use Cufón unless you can sleep knowing that at least some of your visitors are bound to run into cufon-specific issues
- Be sure to include all characters you might need (e.g. €, é, ç, …) when generating your Cufón font files.
- Be sure to enable gzip/ deflate and to implement caching directives on your webserver to somewhat limit that often ridiculous amount of font-data users have to download
- Tell Cufón to render using cufon.now() before calling those nasty external javascript-includes (e.g. Google Analytics) to avoid a visible delay between the moment the DOM is loaded and your cufon-javascript applying the new fonts
- Try to find a “default” font that comes as close to your Cufón font as possible (in terms of size, weight, …) to limit the visual impact of any Cufón-rendering delay
As for the accompanying image (of a zoomed in Cufón demo page); don’t be surprised if someone tells you your text seems just a little bit less readable, because it will be.