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

Tab Atkins wrote:

> While I certainly like many of the abilities that SVG fonts can bring,
> I was under the impression that the problems with them run further
> than what you list. 

I'm also wondering about this. The idea of making colour and animation 
available to fonts for display settings* is attractive, but I'm not 
convinced that bolting SVG into an sfnt structure à la CFF is the way to 
go about it. Is SVG in fact a good mechanism for colour and animation in 
fonts? Might a better one be defined? If SVG fonts were more widely 
supported than they are, then Adam's proposal would be compelling, but 
given how wary some of the major players have been of SVG Fonts in 
general, I'm wondering if we should be considering options, including 
defining something clean and intrinsically sfnt compatible from scratch.

At the W3C gathering in Lyon last year, Christopher Slye (Adobe) and I 
had an interesting conversation with Doug Schepers (W3C) regarding 
'Fonts 2.0', and the possibilities of W3C working with the font 
community to identify what sort of things on screen typography might 
need -- both in terms of fancy stuff like colour, and also improving 
text reading experience -- and defining these as W3 recommendations. 
Although Doug is heavily involved with SVG, it wasn't obvious from the 
conversation that SVG Fonts would *necessarily* be the basis for any of 
this.

JH



* There are also examples of scripts that are traditionally bi-colour in 
text settings to. The most obvious of these is the Ethiopic Ge'ez 
script, which has bi-colour punctuation signs in traditional 
manuscripts. The Unicode glyph charts show only the black portion of 
these signs, which traditionally are augmented with red.

Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 18:50:40 UTC