FontSprite - a new approach to custom fonts on the web

From the website:

"By using the FontSprite generator, you can create sprite images of glyphs from your chosen font. Then, give the FontSprite engine your image, and the metrics data that the generator calculated for you. On your website, the engine creates a span for every letter, and perfectly sprites and places the rendered font as a background image, to create the illusion of custom fonted text! Best of all, you can copy and paste! (kinda)"

This is such an ugly hack. I'm giving this story an upvote just for the persistence this guy showed. To see how this affects selecting text, go to the examples page: http://jasper.clarkberg.org/fontsprite/engine.html#examples And try to select the text at the top of the page (viz, Here is some text set in Adelle. Make it casual with some Idolwild! Even Zapfino kinda works)

Notice how the selection appears offset from the displayed text? Jarring.

I admire this hacker for his ingenuity and persistence, but font-embedding will only be practical for websites with a dedicated audience, I'm afraid.