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

On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:54:37 +0200, Robert O'Callahan  
<robert@ocallahan.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Tab Atkins <tabatkins@google.com> 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.  For example, you theoretically have the ability
>> to add an <html:video> to a <glyph> (loading the data from a data:
>> url, if necessary).  How does this work?
>>
>
> I would just say that the user-agent should impose the same restrictions  
> on
> SVG fonts as on SVG images, and leave it at that for now. That doesn't
> really solve the problem, but it reduces it to a problem we need to solve
> anyway (both at the implementation and spec levels).
>
> Rob

The reason why I like SVG Fonts is because they're different to the other  
formats. It's easy to build a new SVG Font using javascript and to use it  
directly in the browser. If an SVG Font is stored in an OFF container I  
take it that would mean that it's not possible to change it dynamically?

I remember discussing javascript in SVG Fonts with Dave Crossland at a  
conference, and there are some interesting things you could do with that,  
e.g randomize glyph selection (to make a more natural handwriting font for  
example). This is a bit of a pain to do today, but you can do that with  
altGlyph (note: altGlyph isn't part of the font itself, it's an operation  
on the text, but it can be used together with an SVG Font to give the  
custom glyph-selection functionality). Such a script would need to operate  
on the document that uses the font and needs access to the SVG Font too  
for knowing what glyphs to map to, so it's rather context-dependent.  
There's currently no way to define random glyph-mapping in the svg font  
itself. Out of curiosity I'd be interested in hearing if there are any  
other use-cases that would be helped by having script support in the font  
itself.


-- 
Erik Dahlstrom, Core Technology Developer, Opera Software
Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
Personal blog: http://my.opera.com/macdev_ed

Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 08:04:35 UTC