Re: animation in SVG-in-OT glyphs

0. Animation was a required capability of the color font format Adobe was looking to develop, in the early years when emoji was making it way into Unicode. Animated emoji (tears streaming down a face, or eyes blinking coyly) were considered something that should be implementable at some point in the future with the format we and our partners (the foremost among them Mozilla) converged upon. Thus SWF, and then SVG.

1. For the past several years I’ve learned about or heard from various parties showing interest in OT-SVG’s animation facilities: researchers at universities, designers, type geeks, font designers (most recently a major studio that has designed fonts included by Apple and Microsoft in its OSes). In all cases, I’ve pointed them to Firefox’s implemention – though given what Roel said, I’ll check out Edge as well.

I’d recommend not removing the implementation from Firefox. More clearly specifying animation in OT-SVG (resolving the CSS vs SMIL method, among others), and adding variability to OT-SVG were two future projects explicitly put aside by the recent working group that came up with the latest round of clarifications to the ‘SVG ’ table. The goal of that group – led by Peter Constable at Microsoft – was to specify a minimum profile for the SVG in OT-SVG, occasioned by Apple’s desire to do so in its implementation. We did not want to be distracted by animation or variability at that point. They are definitely “next up” projects.

2. As Adam said, there is some interest in animation with variable fonts. From what I’ve seen, animations are mostly used to demonstrate variability, as an advertising tool for the font itself or for variable font technology.

Animation with variable fonts at its core is a layer above the fonts themselves, e.g. @keyframes animating the font-variation-settings CSS property. With OT-SVG, the animation is within the font itself.

With animation on variable fonts, certainly widths and layout could change. With animation within OT-SVG, widths are prohibited from changing.

I should also note that not all animation of fonts requires that every snapshot in time be a typographically sound design. An algorithmic morph or move could be just fine, depending on the speed of animation, whether text or graphics, and other factors.

All this to say that there is enough interest in this area that cutting edge impls such as those in Firefox and Edge would be useful as people look into this more.

3. Color font technologies have resulted in the advent of more graphic artists in the font creation space (there are over 1000 OT-SVG fonts on https://creativemarket.com/). The economics have shown quite some potential; see https://creativemarket.com/blog/nicky-laatz-million-dollars (many of her fonts are color fonts). Just as type designers may be more interested in variable fonts because of their training and expertise, and graphic designers in color fonts because of theirs, animation could increase the pool of font creators still further. I think this is a good thing (much more to say on this).

4. Lastly, OpenType-SVG has always specified that animation is optional in implementations (see Vlad’s note). This was specified for obvious reasons: animation may be extremely disruptive to a text client’s architecture (also, in some situations animation is just not possible, e.g. printing to paper). So there shouldn’t be a concern that all implementations will be required to support it.

Sairus

From: "list.adam@twardoch.com" <list.adam@twardoch.com>
Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 2:03 PM
To: Vladimir Levantovsky <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com>
Cc: Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@gmail.com>, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>, "public-svgopentype@w3.org" <public-svgopentype@w3.org>
Subject: Re: animation in SVG-in-OT glyphs
Resent-From: "public-svgopentype@w3.org" <public-svgopentype@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 2:03 PM

I wouldn't drop or discount the notion of animation quite yet.

OpenType in the last few years has seen two major extensions: color and variability. I think if variable fonts hadn't appeared, implementers would have devoted more manpower to fuller color support. But in the last two years, they put a lot of effort to support variation.

The dynamic behind variable fonts effectively gave us a third animation technique — there had been discussions about the "time axis", and we've seen animations made using variable fonts, both mono and color (made via COLR and via layering):

- https://codepen.io/lorp/details/PRdNYq<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcodepen.io%2Florp%2Fdetails%2FPRdNYq&data=02%7C01%7Csppatel%40adobe.com%7Cc9d8e445b9314d5c826f08d623f37c6b%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636735926004338038&sdata=i7GkES4KkbRGBTHd2U%2FQl8acfWwHkfTZ9%2B6vwuoxRzo%3D&reserved=0>
- https://codepen.io/lorp/details/RMmRgB<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcodepen.io%2Florp%2Fdetails%2FRMmRgB&data=02%7C01%7Csppatel%40adobe.com%7Cc9d8e445b9314d5c826f08d623f37c6b%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636735926004338038&sdata=wiRUjoj0Ae2iegGsD71C%2BseO%2FyyxpsmnYNxBv0vERwY%3D&reserved=0>
- http://tosche.net/AnimatedPixelatedVF/<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftosche.net%2FAnimatedPixelatedVF%2F&data=02%7C01%7Csppatel%40adobe.com%7Cc9d8e445b9314d5c826f08d623f37c6b%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636735926004348043&sdata=oKWAphIpbtlHnjp%2BGvLD8DPV0smxqd5V6CHDd2h%2Bv4Y%3D&reserved=0>

So we have SVG+SMIL, SVG+CSS, and variable+JS. That's a lot of paths to go. With so many options on the table, it's no surprise that type designers, font engineers, font tool makers and browser/OS/app makers haven’t give us “Everything” quite yet.

But we’re just 5 years since the first color formats appeared and two years since variable fonts emerged. OpenType Layout has debuted in 1996/1999 and it took a long time to get a reasonable deployment. Let’s wait and see where the community consensus leads us!

Best,
Adam


On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 22:46, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com<mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com>> wrote:
Note that the latest version of the OpenType spec has the following language in it:
"Some implementations may support use of animations—either SVG animation or CSS animation. Note that support for animation is optional and is not recommended in fonts intended for wide distribution."

Cheers,
Vlad


-----Original Message-----
From: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2018 10:55 PM
To: Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@gmail.com<mailto:jfkthame@gmail.com>>; public-svgopentype@w3.org<mailto:public-svgopentype@w3.org>
Subject: RE: animation in SVG-in-OT glyphs

I would support (with much fanfare!) dropping this feature!!

Leonard

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@gmail.com<mailto:jfkthame@gmail.com>>
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2018 4:45 PM
To: public-svgopentype@w3.org<mailto:public-svgopentype@w3.org>
Subject: animation in SVG-in-OT glyphs

Among the various implementations of SVG-in-OpenType, how widely supported is animation of the SVG glyphs?

Is this a feature that people consider valuable, or should we consider dropping it in the interests of simplification and greater uniformity across implementations?

Jonathan