I was also psyched when I ran across this article, which showed how to combine Cufon with CSS’s @font-face using the jquery.fontavailable plugin:

http://kilianvalkhof.com/2009/css-xhtml/combining-cufon-and-font-face/

It basically comes down to declaring @font-face in your CSS, but also having this code snippet:

$(document).ready(function() {
if(!$.fontAvailable(‘Name of your font’)) {
Cufon.replace(‘h1′);
}
});

As in, if the @font-face directive succeeded, you’re all set; otherwise let Cufon take care of the font.

It looks really promising, but *unfortunately*, this logic fails on Firefox 3.5 and up (I don’t know about previous versions). Not sure why, but other people have noticed it, and the maintainers of the plugin know about it:

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-fontavailable/issues/detail?id=2

Some day this stuff will be more consistent, I’m sure!

Thanks again for this tutorial!