When using sIFR 2.0 at work, we came across some mysterious problems: Font size was highly variable, lines broke in the wrong place or didn’t break at all, and the whole thing was generally a mess.
The culprit turned out to be the default letter-spacing (-9px) in the decoy stylesheet. sIFR uses the decoy to create the headline, which then gets “read” for height and width by sIFR, and then replaced by Flash lettering. By default, sIFR is working with some kind of narrow DIN font, so the -9 spacing was in place to attempt to correctly size the final headline for such a thin typeface. However, for a font like Avenir, the letterspacing in the decoy needs to be bumped up to 1 (Avenir is slightly wider than Arial) for sIFR to read and display it correctly…otherwise, it’ll be reading your headlines as much shorter than they actually should be, and spitting out tiny distorted text.
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