RE: SVG Text elements within glyphs

On Sunday, January 26, 2014 8:12 PM Chris Lilley wrote:
> Saturday, January 25, 2014, 11:59:33 PM, Daniel wrote:
> 
> > Interesting Spec Proposal. I know that the train has already left the
> > station, still I was wondering about two questions related to
> > possible text elements in the Glyph-SVG:
> 
> Firstly, bear in mind that what is being standardized for SVG Glyphs in
> OpenType is the use of SVG graphics as OpenType glyph outlines. Not the
> SVG 'glyph' element and related elements (collectively, "SVG Fonts").
> 

And it's also important to mention that while "train has already left the station" it is not yet reached the final destination, so changes and corrections are still possible.

> > - I didn't see any restrictions on text-content elements (like "text")
> > in the SVG glyph description. Does this imply, that text rendering
> > will possibly be a recursive process in which the software component
> > that renders
> > (SVG-) glyphs will have to perform additional text layout for the
> > contained text-content elements?
> 
> In theory, yes. And this would have the expected performance hit, just
> as in theory you could specify an outline with millions of points which
> again, would be slow to render.
> 
> Speaking of text layout, recall that SVG supports only a single
> unwrapped line of text, with no auto-wrapping; although absolute and
> relative shift are allowed which can be used to produce a fixed layout.
> 
> Thus, in practice, if someone makes a glyph which contains textual
> elements, this would likely contain a very small amount (otherwise the
> effect is not visible) and then only on display type likely to be used
> at large sizes.
> 

I am concerned that recursive process may present another challenge. Let's assume for a moment that there is an SVG glyph which contains textual elements, which include a character that would need to be rendered using the very same glyph description that contains textual element, which include a character  that ... where does it end?
Considering that the main purpose of using SVG is to offer rich graphics design capabilities for font developers to describe glyphs as units of text display - would it make sense to disallow the use of textual elements as part of the SVG glyph description?

Thank you,
Vlad

Received on Monday, 27 January 2014 19:37:27 UTC