SVG Glyphs in Opentype - an update

Hello folks,

At the August meeting at the TypeCon conference, several people seemed
to be of the opinion that the SVG Glyphs in OpenType spec was
immature, not finished, that there were two competing specifications,
and so on. We corrected that impression but needed to indicate stability.

So for ATypI in October, the spec was published as a final
specification (there are only two states for a CG, draft and final)
which also triggers a round of patent commitments (most members of the
CG have now made the commitment and I am told that Adobe is working on
it). This marks the spec as ready for standardisation (CGs dont make
standards); typically this means chartering a Working group but in
this case it means handoff to ISO SC29 where Open Type is
standardised.

At the meeting the Google proposal (static PNG images), the Microsoft
one (multiple solid-colour truetype shapes, with hinting) and the SVG
Glyphs for OpenType proposal (multicolor, gradient, filter,
animations) were all presented and explained y their proponents (Apple
was not present to explain theirs, which is also not published but has
been reverse engineered).

I introduced the SVG proposal and explained what it could do (and what
it would not do, like include HTML or Flash or script) and gave
background and responded to several questions.

Sairus showed a tablet rendering a shaded, 3D-look incised version of
Adobe Trajan. Jonathan showed an old Android phone and a new Firefox
OS phone both running Firefox with coloured emoji and an animated font
(using SVG, smil-style animation).

It seems there is interest in each of the three proposals for
different use cases and it seems likely that more than one (perhaps
all three) will be standardized. In that connection, work to create
the shared palette table (SVG and Microsoft approaches both use this
table) was a positive sign.

ISO SC29 will be meeting in January to discuss the proposals.

-- 
Best regards,
 Chris                          mailto:chris@w3.org

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2013 15:44:27 UTC