Re: Request for onGlyphFailed Event

On Tue, 03 Jun 2003, Jim Ley wrote:

> I'm currently strugglying with font issues in SVG, I'm rendering unknown
> content that may come from anywhere in the world and be in any glyph
> (peoples names etc.) I've got my backend stuff all apparently working with
> i18n, but I'm now struggling with the SVG font issues.    I can't embed all
> the characters I might find, as that'd soon get too large, however if I
> could identify that particular glyphs have failed to render, then I could
> switch to a version with those embedded (or dynamically embed them with
> getURL etc.)  To achieve this, I'd like an onGlyphFailedEvent which will
> fire when any character fails to render within a text/tspan etc. (or perhaps
> for each individual glyph, I'm not sure which would be better.)

Interesting feature request.

Can I try rewording it? 

You want the UA to fire an event before (or as) it draws any missing glyph.
I assume you don't want it constantly firing, so it would just be on first
processing. What happens if I change the font-family property on the text,
does it fire again (unless the glyph is found this time)?

One problem might be that a few SVG viewers hand off all that complicated
text rubbish to a platform text library. I'm not sure if they can always
get this information back.

Dean