Re: text to path conversion API proposal

Thanks for the questions, Dirk.

On 21/10/11 2:59 PM, Dirk Schulze wrote:
> This should work independent of the used font / font type? WOFF, SVG
>  Fonts, OpenType,... for all types?

Good question.  Obviously for complex glyph SVG Fonts you have more than
just an outline, so this API is inadequate for that.  But otherwise, I
would expect this to work for any outline font format.

> Should this work with texts on paths as well?

Yes.

> What do you expect for benefits, when do we need that?

So that authors can use script to perform their own processing and
effects on text.  In writing a demo to do some warping of text along a
path, I needed the path data for the text.  I instead had to open
Inkscape, convert my text to a path, and embed the path data in my
document.  That's not going to work for text chosen at run time.

> I know that Gecko supports it for HTML Canvas, but I never saw an
> example that uses that.

You can do ctx.mozPathText("Some text") to set the current path to be
the outline of the text, but I don't know that you can get the path data
back out again can you?

> I should mention that it would be very hard to implement it in WebKit
> and some ports may never be able to use that.

Details of the difficulties would be useful.

> How do you determine the path segments of a glyph?

Whether you would be required to return the exact same path segments for
the same font and text across implementations is a good question.  It's
a similar issue to what normalizedPathSegList should return.

> It must be transformed to SVG Path syntax somehow and I am not sure
> how we get similar results across implementations for
> SVGPathSegList.

You are right that there is a risk there of sites ending up depending on 
particular path data coming out of the API for a given font.

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 19:19:04 UTC