RE: SVG Fonts inside of OpenType fonts? [Cross-post from www-font@w3.org]

Isn't this use case already covered by the font-family property.
In SVG you can simply write:
font-family="MySVGFont, sans-serif"

Typically one can assume, that there is no meaningful alternative 
for the internal SVG font concering the intended functionality (animation,
use of multiple complex shapes etc), therefore the generic-family should
be enough to keep the text at least readable, if due to a bug the viewer
cannot interprete the internal SVG font. But even this is not without 
problems, if the fallback font is not precisely adjusted to the SVG font,
else the fallback takes more or less or other space than intended.
This can result in the problem, that the fallback is not readable at
all, for example because it is partly out of the viewBox, therefore such
external fonts are no real alternative, authors can simple care about,
that they really work as alternative at least for readability in a viewer
with such a bug.
If one puts the SVG font inside some other cryptic file, this is an even
bigger barrier for SVG authors to care about this. But of course it should
be no problem to reference the SVG font in other files as already intended
by the existing recommendations.

Note that a typical fallback for SVG today is to use no fonts at all but
the path element even without advanced graphical effects, 
see for example the SVG output of openstreetmap.org .
This basically means for todays usage, that accessibility of 'text'
information in SVG is lost due to the bugs of some current viewers.
External fonts or other font formats are not really used as alternative, if
it matters. Authors look for alternatives, that provide exactly the
intended graphical presentation, not the text information itself.
Both seems to be only possible with reliable implementations of
SVG fonts.


Olaf

Received on Monday, 27 June 2011 10:06:21 UTC