I have been TRYING to figure out what font this is, as I really want to use it on my site. (I am talking about the font used for the article titles, in this case, "Free Markets, Free Muslims). But I have scoured the CSS and can not figure it out. Also, when I right click the font, after selecting it, I get an Adobe Flash Player 10 dialogue... is it possible they are using flash to render the font. If so, how, I have never heard of that? Particularly since I can select and copy the text like normal.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65497/jon-b-alterman/free-markets-free-muslims

Dani AI

Generated

Good catch by — the Adobe dialog on right‑click is the giveaway that the page was using a Flash‑based text replacement, which can still present selectable text. ’s observation about not finding the font in the stylesheet is also common: replacement scripts inject rendered text or embed objects instead of relying on a simple font-family rule.

How to confirm what's happening:

  • Open the browser dev tools (F12) and inspect the article title node. Check the element type (is it object/embed or an h1 with scripts attached?).
  • Look in the Network tab for font files (.woff, .woff2, .ttf, .otf) or for .swf files.
  • Search the page source for replacement script names or calls; those scripts usually live in the page head or just before </body>.
  • If the computed style shows a normal font-family but you still get an Adobe dialog, that strongly implies a replacement layer rather than a hosted webfont.

If the goal is to reproduce that look today, skip Flash. Use downloadable webfonts or a hosted service. Minimal example using @font-face:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'MyCustom';
  src: url('/fonts/MyCustom.woff2') format('woff2'),
       url('/fonts/MyCustom.woff') format('woff');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
h1.article-title { font-family: 'MyCustom', Georgia, serif; }

Notes: check font licensing before hosting, prefer WOFF2 for performance, preload or use font-display to avoid long blank text, and test fallbacks on slow connections. Flash-based solutions are obsolete (Adobe ended Flash support), so modern projects should use @font-face or services like Google Fonts for reliability and accessibility. For @font-face details see the MDN guide: (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face).

Recommended Answers

All 2 Replies

If the titles are showing up as Flash, then it's probably done with either sFIR or possibly Cufon. And yes, they are rendering the text with Flash, and Flash does allow you to select text.

great info! I had never heard of sIFR but I checked it out and am floored. Will be implementing on my site soon...

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.