- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:21:15 +0200
- To: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- CC: Patrick Garies <pgaries@fastmail.us>, rfink@readableweb.com, <www-font@w3.org>
On Thursday, October 22, 2009, 7:46:28 AM, Thomas wrote:
TP> To do literally what you desire is no longer possible, as there are
TP> almost 100K characters defined in Unicode, and a font conforming to
TP> any of the common standards (e.g. OpenType) can hold no more than 64K
TP> glyphs to represent those characters.
Interestingly an SVG font could hold that number of characters. being XML rather than binary, it has not bitfield-imposed limits on things like the number of characters.
But it would be massive, even compressed.
Also, SVG does not have the advanced layout capabilities to render strings using all of the Unicode glyphs. (Well, neither does OpenType, but it does more). And although I have in the past argued for extending the internationalization features of SVG [1] I now think that would be wasted effort. The benefit of SVG fonts is decorative richness, and compatibility with existing implementations and content.
If more I18n capabilities are needed in fonts (and they are), OpenType is the place to put them. (By the way, such changes to OpenType would be out of scope for the proposed Working group, as I hope the draft charter makes clear).
[1] Extending SVG Fonts with Graphite
http://unicode.org/iuc/iuc23/a359.html
--
Chris Lilley mailto:chris@w3.org
Technical Director, Interaction Domain
W3C Graphics Activity Lead
Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 11:21:26 UTC