RE: svg fonts as web font format?

Gustavo Ferreira asked:

> sorry if this question is naive or has already been discussed, but
> what are the problems with svg-fonts? wasn't this w3c's proposal for
> web-fonts in the first place? why not invest time & effort in making
> svg-fonts finally work, and extend it with the necessary meta-info?

You don't want to go there....

Basically, SVG fonts have dropped all sorts of info that would be necessary for web fonts. SVG fonts are only intended for viewing at largish sizes (no hinting). The UA would have to take on responsibility for font rendering (assumed in SVG) or translate the font back to something the OS could render, which latter would be much more difficult/complicated because of the things that have been dropped in the translation.

Just to re-create bounding box info (for example), the UA would have to parse (and arguably render at fairly high res) every single glyph in the font to check where it's furthest extents are in X and Y.

Cheers,

T

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2008 15:04:51 UTC