Sistr – Free open source rich typography tool for Silverlight

Last week during the ReMix 09 keynote in Belgium, two companies, These Days and Ventigrate officially announced the first alpha release of Sistr. Sistr is a component that makes use of jQuery and Silverlight 3 to render richer fonts in web applications. It’s implemented in such a way that it’s very SEO friendly but at the same time allows you to integrate fonts that would otherwise need to be converted to PNG images.

You might have seen the Flash counterpart of this component, named sIFR. You might want to look at a short comparison table to see the capabilities.

Using Sistr on your site is pretty straightforward and explained on the HowTo page.

How to get started?  Easy, just download jQuery library and Sistr component. The standard version does not include the source code, which is available if you want to embed fonts.
Unzip the Sistr file, this gives you a small sample project that shows you how to integrate the component in a site.

Congratulations to Ventigrate and These Days for giving back to the community with this tool.