Darice de Cuba

Even though coming from this Apple fan mouth I will say this:

The iPad just hit the Kindle out of the park and all other e-readers and tablets behind it.

I would buy the iPad to use as a e-reader only, the iBook store and app is to a book lover what iTunes is to music lovers and everyone else. They idea only that I can browse books like that and buy them on the spot is nirvana like. And turning a book page works like dragging a page manually! It doesn’t get any more closer to the real thing.

Now I only have to sit tight, save money and wait for it to be released in the Netherlands. I would doubt in getting it with 3G or not, but having experienced being in places with no WiFi and being able to turn to 3G on my iPhone takes that doubt away. With 3G it will be.

The iPad elegantly replaces my Hakingtosh netbook combi with iPhone tethering when staying at places without WiFi.

Apple even re-did the whole iWork UI and functionality especially for the iPad, now that’s what I call dedication!

Update

Well turns out the CSS code given before doesn’t work with IE. The problem with IE that I could figure so far is that it needs to have local src.

@font-face { font-family: 'MyFont'; src: url('fonts/MyFont.eot'); src: local('My Font'), local('MyFont'), url('fonts/MyFont.ttf') format('truetype'); }

Without the “local” font-face won’t work in IE.

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I’m working on a client website that requires a custom font on the navigation menu’s and headers. The font came in the old Apple format, PostScript type. The easiest way to use this would be using sIFR or Cufon. But I am partial to those methods due that they require Flash and/or JavaScript.

To use font-face I need a TrueType(.ttf) file for Gecko and Webkit browers and Embedded OpenType(.eot) for Internet Explorer.

First thing I did was a Google search to find out how to convert PostScript type font. This can be done by opening your Terminal, navigate to the location of the font you want to convert and run the following command: cat "MyFont/..namedfork/rsrc" > "MyFont.dfont"

This will convert the PostScript to dfont.

Through Googling I found a free online converter where you can upload your dfont file and convert it to TrueType(.ttf). You can convert to eot. also but the file it generated didn’t work for me. Instead I used the command line tool TTF2EOT I found via Jonathan Snook’s Font Embed article.

So now I had a .ttf and an eot. file. Next was a working CSS. I used the following CSS code:

@font-face { font-family: 'MyFont'; src: url('fonts/MyFont.eot'); src: url('fonts/MyFont.ttf') format('truetype'); }wrong code, see above update

Good practice shows you have to use the local: method too in case users have the font on their computer. But in this case the chance is of that is neglect able. So I opted to keep the code to a minimum.

The simplicity of font-face makes me really want there to be a license solution for web fonts that doesn’t require an intermediate. I’m not a browser tech, but of if there could be a way to to protect the font files from direct download or an encryption method, that already would go a long way to protecting licensed fonts.

But as long as there isn’t I will use free fonts and in commercial situations Typekit will have to do, that is if they have the font in their library.