Re: Co-chair Meeting Minutes: April 14, 2020 [via Music Notation Community Group]

HI all,

Sorry for the radio silence from me over the last couple of days.

Yes, I was using FontForge to convert the OpenType PS version of Bravura to SVG, but I’m trying to keep the toolchain as simple as possible. At the moment my toolchain includes a motley crew of FontLab 7, fontparts, defcon, the improbably-named FontPlop, and more besides.

I believe this online service:

https://cloudconvert.com/otf-to-svg


uses FontForge behind the scenes, so you might find that this is a good way to get an SVG version of Bravura.

Daniel

From: James Sutton <jsutton@dolphin-com.co.uk>
Date: Thursday, 16 April 2020 at 09:51
To: Glenn Linderman <v+smufl@g.nevcal.com>
Cc: Daniel Spreadbury <D.Spreadbury@steinberg.de>, "public-music-notation@w3.org" <public-music-notation@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Co-chair Meeting Minutes: April 14, 2020 [via Music Notation Community Group]

Hi Glenn, and everybody else,

Sorry to keep banging on about this, but..

WOFF  (Web Open Font Format) format is something of a red-herring as it only defines a compression wrapper for TrueType/OpenType fonts to allow them to load quickly into a browser. It is a web technology and not applicable in a non-browser environment

SVG offers a simple solution for defining symbols, and SVG files are very easy to read and decode. SVG font is just a wrapper for multiple SVG symbols

By contrast TrueType/OpenType fonts are really complicated and difficult to handle in a cross-platform environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType


Handling of TrueType/OpenType fonts is out of the question for me. It would cost a huge amount of work and would get me no benefit!

If there is a way to convert TrueType/OpenType fonts to SVG I will be happy. If not I will have to live with it. How was the original Bravura SVG font produced? Was it using a simple conversion utility?

best regards
James Sutton
Dolphin Computing
www.dolphin-com.co.uk<http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk>
www.seescore.co.uk<http://www.seescore.co.uk>
www.playscore.co<http://www.playscore.co>






On 15 Apr 2020, at 22:42, Glenn Linderman <v+smufl@g.nevcal.com<mailto:v+smufl@g.nevcal.com>> wrote:

On 4/15/2020 1:22 PM, James Sutton wrote:

Hi Glenn,
A standard font format is not at all convenient for our purposes, SVG is.The parser implementation we use is our own (and it's really simple).
I see no sign that SVG is about to be abandoned as a standard!


I never thought, implied, or stated that SVG was to be abandoned.  Read more carefully.  I only thought, implied, and stated that SVG fonts are deprecated as part of the SVG standard (version 2.0 sperifically, although I didn't state that, because the earlier link I posted stated that).


It has a future https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/



And in section 11.1.2 of the link you just posted, it clearly states to use WOFF fonts.  So if you want to use fonts, and want to grow with SVG, then you should use WOFF fonts.  Surprise! There is a Bravura.woff!  Or if not, it is easily created from Bravura.ttf.



It is perfect for defining symbols which is what we are using it for in this case.
We are not 'clinging tightly to deprecated features' but we certainly do not want to take on a pile of work for no good reason


SVG fonts are a deprecated feature of the SVG standard! Long live SVG! But use SVG fonts for new development at your own risk.

I'll leave the whole quoted email, so you can re-read it, and realize that I said nothing about SVG itself being deprecated.


best regards
James Sutton
Dolphin Computing
www.dolphin-com.co.uk<http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk> <http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk>
www.seescore.co.uk<http://www.seescore.co.uk> <http://www.seescore.co.uk>
www.playscore.co<http://www.playscore.co> <http://www.playscore.co>

On 15 Apr 2020, at 19:38, Glenn Linderman <v+smufl@g.nevcal.com<mailto:v+smufl@g.nevcal.com> <mailto:v+smufl@g.nevcal.com>> wrote:

On 4/15/2020 3:23 AM, James Sutton wrote:

Hi Daniel,
I see browsers do not support SVG fonts any longer, but what about non-browsers?

The deprecation was done by the SVG standards committee. So SVG implementations of the future are not likely to support SVG fonts, even if there are some at present that do.

Better to convert your code to use a font format that has a future, than to cling tightly to the remnants of deprecated features.




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