Rasterized type delivery
Thomas Fuchs (of script.aculo.us fame) has written Textorize, a Ruby script that makes subpixel antialiased, properly kerned, PNG images of text that look better than Photoshop-generated text.
Being able to typeset OS-X-quality text for CSS image replacement is fantastic (you don’t need me to explain this if you’ve ever tried to decide among sharp, crisp, and smooth antialiasing options in Photoshop); however, command-line typesetting isn’t something designers will jump up and down about. Unless….
My people take care of that
What if type delivery services were to offer such high-quality, rasterized images of type? What if, say, Typekit knew the size at which I intended to use a typeface, and the color I wanted to use—how difficult would it be to run something like Textorize as an automatic part of serving the type?
If it’s feasible, this could mean that a visitor whose browser does not support @font-face linking, and who may be using Windows or Linux, would see the typeface I want them to see with quality equivalent to OS X.
Given the alternatives of serving visitors a font stack understudy, something plugin-dependent like sIFR, or a scripted solution like Cufon that some type sellers won’t abide, I can see how a sort of hands-free Textorize might be appealing.
Heh. A service would also need the actual text I intended to typeset, at which point we’re talking about a different service model. Hmm.