Re: SVG Fonts [...]

Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:

> And even if a format is cryptic or difficult to edit or at least more
> difficult than to create a glyph with SVG paths, this is no problem as
> long as there is no need to modify or create new glyphs, which need to
> be embedded in the same document to be sure to be always in line with
> a corporate design or whatever are the reasons for designers to have a
> few precisely defined glyphs in a graphic. And if they want to have
> the graphic in a clip art library or at wikimedia commons etc, they do
> not really want to have to care about licenses of fonts from other
> people and therefore have to provide their own glyphs within the same
> file using SVG paths.
> 
> I think, these are pretty different use cases, to provide a font for
> reading a larger amount of text or to provide some specific glyphs
> within the same document for reasons like corporate design,
> advertisement, design etc. The first use case is essential to be able
> to read text at all. The second is advanced graphics. SVG is basically
> graphics expressed as XML. One does not really need graphics in many
> situations, but if their is a decision, that a user agent interpretes
> a graphics format, I think, it has to deal with its specific and
> different use cases as well... And because such an advanced format
> like SVG has built-in accessibility features, a user agent should not
> force authors to ignore them.

You seem to be hung up on the final form font data ends up in.  Given
a set of glyphs designed in SVG, you can use FontForge to create an
OpenType font from those.  If you'd like to view an OpenType font in
XML form, use FontTools/TTX [1]. View, edit, create a new OpenType font
and use it in your SVG.

Do you require JPEG images to be defined in an XML serialization?  Why
does the final form of font data need to be defined exclusively in SVG?

John Daggett

[1] FontTools/TTX
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/

Received on Friday, 4 June 2010 03:53:53 UTC