Re: Current Downloadable Font Status....

Catching up on mail after several weeks travelling ...

On Aug 22, 11:59am, Martin J. Dürst wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Chris Lilley wrote:

> > And then, "I will map my Pi characters to the Unicode Private Use Area".
>
> This is one possibility, but it's confusing.

Less confusing than mapping your Pi characters to ASCII. At least it is
apparent that these are not standard characters, they depend on a private
agreement (ie the context of this single page).

> I guess we should go
> one step further. What about adding some attributes to OBJECT, so
> that we can say:
>
> <OBJECT PI-FONT="Bundesbahn" GLYPH-IDENTIFIER="47">Alt Gif goes here</OBJECT>

Fine, but no need for extra new attributes. Object is a general scheme, it
provides enough flexibility as it is.

Re-casting your example as

<OBJECT DATA="Bundesbahn" TYPE="application/font-tdpfr"
 WIDTH="50" HEIGHT="60">
  <PARAM NAME="GLYPH-IDENTIFIER" VALUE="47">
     <P>Alt Gif goes here
</OBJECT>

requires no new attributes and does the same thing. Having to specify
width and height, in pixels, is a pain in this instance. Using private
use area characters and relying on CSS to apply the right font takes care of
this and ensures that inline dingbats scale with the rest of the text.

Alternatively

<OBJECT DATA="Bundesbahn#47" TYPE="application/font-tdpfr"
 WIDTH="50" HEIGHT="60">
     <P>Alt Gif goes here
</OBJECT>

Compare with this example fr the Computer Graphics Metafile (more
details at [1]):

<OBJECT DATA="foo.cgm#5" TYPE="image/cgm;Version=1;ProfileId=None"
 WIDTH="50" HEIGHT="60">
     <P>Alt Gif goes here
</OBJECT>


> For a font with only one glyph, GLYPH-IDENTIFIER could be left out.

Yes, using the client-side specialiser # the default could clearly be
"display the first glyph"


> Probably we would also need a size attribute, but I guess the right
> way to provide it, as well as other presentation attributes, would
> be via style.

The issue of inheriting style properties into an OBJECT is interesting
and is currently being investigated at RAL.

> Chris, should I submit this proposal to the HTML WG?

I don't think you need any HTML extensions to do this, just an
implementation. Browsers which have already implemented WebFonts should
find support for this fairly simple to add.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-cgm

-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France