Museo
This beautiful slab serif was designed by Jos Buivenga, maker of several of the best free fonts online. Check out josbuivenga.demon.nl for several premium fonts. There are several weights of Museo available for free from myfonts.com. I like this one because it is really readable without losing any character. Click here to see a sample.

Cuprum
This san serif was designed by Jovanny Lemonad and can be downloaded from dafont.com. I don’t know much about it, but it is a simple and easy to read sans serif. I am definitely a fan of this one. Click here to see it in action on Font Burner.

Both of these fonts were recommended to us by readers. Thanks! If you know of a great free font that is absent from our archives, please contact us and we will try to load it into our system.

Visit the plugins homepage or download it from the plugin directory at Wordpress.org. If you use the plugin please give me any feedback that you have. We hope you enjoy this new tool!

Since the launch of Font Burner last April I have had several conversations with Font business people and I can’t point to a single person who has shown any interest in embracing sIFR. At best, they are willing to turn a blind eye to the use of sIFR. At worst, they expect an additional payment for a special sIFR license.

Think about that for a second. You legally purchase a font. You can use it freely anywhere you want. In advertising, on television, in a book, on the side of a plane, in your logo, anywhere. But if you want to use this font on your website, stop the presses! Oh, no! If you want to use the font that YOU PAID FOR on your website you will have to purchase an additional license. That is ridiculous. It is greedy, plain and simple.

This type of restrictive stance is a symptom of an industry that is only interested in turning a profit. This became even more clear to me when I had some correspondence with a representative from a relatively unknown font distribution website. I won’t give them the satisfaction of a link or mentioning them by name.

I was approached by this company because they wanted to know if I would be interested in promoting their free font of the month. At first I thought it would be a mutually beneficial partnership. I would promote their free font of the month and in exchange they would let me use the font within the Font Burner system. But when the details of how the arrangement would work were explained, the obvious one-sided arrangement became apparent.

The company had no interest in letting me use their free font on Font Burner. In fact, they don’t allow the use of any of their fonts with sIFR to anyone without an additional license. Yes, you heard that correctly. You would have to buy a license to use a sIFR version of a font that they are GIVING AWAY FOR FREE! To quote:

We would not want our free font of the month posted to your site, either temporarily or permanently. Thus we were hoping that you would simply promote the free font, and link over to our site for users to download it.

Can you believe that? They expect me to promote their products and send traffic to their site without getting anything in return. They expect something for free in one breath and then in the next they refuse to loosen their restrictive policies in the slightest bit! I can’t use the very font that they want me to promote on my site without being in violation of their license! Unbelievable.

I will end this post with my response to this unscrupulous solicitor:

Thanks for clarifying your license restrictions. Unfortunately, I can’t endorse a company that takes such a limiting stance in regard to sIFR. I don’t agree with requiring additional licenses for using sIFR. If you purchase a font I believe you should legally be able to use it on your website without having to pay extra for that “luxury.” Frankly, I think you have more to gain from making it easier for people to use fonts online than by restricting them, but you guys have to run your business however you feel comfortable. Thanks again for contacting me, and keep me in mind if the licensing atmosphere loosens up at (campany name withheld).

The first site is called sIFR Generator. It is an online tool that makes it easy to convert True Type fonts to a swf file that you can use with siFR. It is compatible with sIFR 3 and might just be the easiest way to generate sIFR font files. If you don’t want to shell out the cash for the arguably overpriced Flash software it is definitely your best option.

The second site I want to point you to is css-tricks.com, where there is a video tutorial about how to use sIFR 3. If you are a visual learner like myself, you are going to find this tutorial is for you. If you are lucky your days of stumbling through the sIFR documentation are over. And while I am on the topic of good sIFR tutorials, you might want to look at these instructions on Design Intellection. Good stuff.

I hope you find these links useful. Good luck with your sIFRing!