RE: proposal for text layout with positioned glyphs, anchoring and bidirectionality

Hi Cameron, all,

I'm not quite sure if what we're talking about here is for an enhanced 1.1 or for 2.0?

If we're talking about 2.0, then I would like to submit these for consideration in addition to what this document [1] seems to be discussing

1. clarification of getExtentofText so that browser behavior (currently inconsistent) allows for alignment of tops of glyphs along a common baseline. See [2] for details.
2. A discussed here [3] & [4] , it would be nice to be able to flow glyphs in a way that squeezes their shapes to conform to both a top curve and a bottom curve. Such textual effects are surprisingly common in advertising, logos, shop signs, music album covers and the like, once one starts looking for them. Think of the WordArt effects in Microsoft Word only considerably more flexible, scriptable, and animatable. Squishing glyphs into convex polygons (such as in the logos for "NFL", "HTML5" and "Bankers Box") requires non-affine transforms, but those are already a part of 2.0 so should not too major a headache. There is another advantage here and that is it may set the stage for many typographical devices used in cartography in which not just text but glyphs conform to bounding regions.


[1] http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Proposals/Text_layout
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2011May/0141.html 
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2011May/0022.html (issue 5)
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2011May/0025.html 

Cheers
David
-----Original Message-----
From: www-svg-request@w3.org [mailto:www-svg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Cameron McCormack
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 11:32 PM
To: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: proposal for text layout with positioned glyphs, anchoring and bidirectionality

SVG text with positioned glyphs, anchoring and bidirectionality is
greatly non-interoperable and somewhat underspecified.  We have
discussed some aspects of this in a couple of threads on the WG mailing
list over the last week or so:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-wg/2011AprJun/0062.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-wg/2011AprJun/0082.html

I want to make a proposal for defining text layout behaviour in these
cases.  Comments and suggestions (particularly any suggested
simplifications) are welcome.

  http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Proposals/Text_layout

(Apologies for the general illegibility of the WG wiki; I figured it’s
better for refining the proposal to have it up there than in a plain
text email.)

-- 
Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/

Received on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 19:24:48 UTC