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Recently, we announced another collaboration with Oxford University Press, this time on the design of the newly launched Oxford Bibliographies Online. Chris Reidy of the Boston Globe ran a news update that appeared online, and in the Globe’s digital newsletter.
It’s not often that we take a moment to pat ourselves on the back, or similarly, post press releases to our blog. We are so thrilled about our latest launch of Oxford Dictionaries Online, however, we wanted to share the news with you—our loyal blog readers. If you haven’t already spotted the release across the networks, we have included a few bits and pieces— and a link to the entire release—below.
Oxford Dictionaries Online is Oxford’s innovative modern English dictionary and language reference service. Featuring smart-linked, fully searchable content from Oxford’s largest modern English dictionaries and thesauruses, ODO provides comprehensive coverage of British, US, and World English with more than 350,000 definitions and 600,000 synonyms and antonyms.
PubFactory’s customizable features include a ‘My Oxford Dictionary’ feature for creating your own profile and saving entries and searches, an innovative alpha word wheel for browsing, and a user-friendly advanced search.
“We are delighted to have worked with iFactory in developing Oxford Dictionaries Online,” said Judy Pearsall, Head of Dictionaries, Oxford University Press. “This was a large custom-built project with complex data needs, and iFactory excelled in building an enticing and intuitive interface with underlying data sophistication and robust technology. Overall we’re pleased that it’s been such a good match of design, data skills, and rich content.”
The selection of PubFactory for Oxford Dictionaries Online continues a long-standing relationship between iFactory and OUP.
At a small tech gathering recently in Boston, font guru Paul Irish illustrated how the web is finally ready for a richer web fonts experience. For some time now, designers and developers have been stuck with only a handful of default “web friendly” fonts: Helvetica, Arial, Times, Courier, Georgia, among others. While a variety of techniques have cropped up over the years to satisfy the need for other fonts (such tools have included sifR, typeface.js, Cufón, and even text-to-image replacers), not all browsers incorporated native techniques for embedding unique fonts. This has been a source of frustration for designers trying to break out of the mold and do more sophisticated and exciting work, as alternative tools all have had implementation hazards and limitations of one kind or another.
This is all changing, as technology is crossing the threshold toward a brighter web fonts horizon. This isn’t to say the way ahead isn’t void of other challenges, particularly as concerns licensing. Rather, many of the key pieces are set to do the most basic of things: embed fonts natively into the browser with stunning visual results. So how is this possible (and why was it not really feasible earlier)?
The first place to look is at cross-browser implementation/support. Atypically, Internet Explorer is actually years ahead in the charge. They’ve allowed font embedding since IE4, where most of the other browsers have taken a while to catch up. (Though Opera actually introduced the spec.) From figures taken from StatCounter.com’s global stats website, 95% of the major browsers have native font embedding capabilities — that missing 5% being Firefox 3.0. (All other browsers support: IE6+, FF3.5+, Safari 3+, Chrome, and Opera.)
Continue reading…
Whether you arrived here by way of our new website, or by other means—we encourage you to explore our new site!
http://www.ifactory.com
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