Re: specification for Mozilla's SVG in OpenType proposal

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Sairus Patel <sppatel@adobe.com> wrote:

> At first glance, this proposal seems to have been developed with no
> reference to the discussions that have been taking place on this list re.
> various design decisions.
>
> For example, one of the first design decisions was whether all glyphs were
> to be represented in a single SVG doc, each glyph in its own doc, or a
> hybrid or chunking approach (multiple SVG docs each containing one or more
> glyphs). I recall the consensus being the first option, and this was
> reflected in the Adobe draft proposals. However, Mozilla's proposal uses
> the third option. Is this a deliberate choice and preference, or simply the
> way Mozilla's implementation happened to have done it, unaware of (or
> perhaps predating) discussions on this list?
>

We were aware of some of those discussions. I actually took part in some of
them. In fact we started our implementation assuming there would just be a
single document containing all glyphs. But it became clear during the
project that supporting multiple documents each containing one or more
glyphs would be negligible extra work, and would potentially address more
use cases, so we switched to that.

Another example is the proposed new glyphchar attribute. This goes against
> the principle that the SVG glyph descriptions are purely graphical, and
> that all semantics and metrics are to be taken from the usual OT tables
> ('cmap', 'hmtx', etc).
>

As Cameron said, "glyphchar" does not affect the processing of OT tables.
It's just an alternative way to specify the glyph ID for an SVG element
that's more convenient in some cases.

So this proposal seems to have taken the discussion back to the drawing
> board in at least a couple of ways. This is fine if reasons are offered
> that weren't discussed before, but I don't see any.
>

I think the changes/differences are really very minor.

Rob
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