SVG text questions

Hi SVG people,

   I'm reading the SVG spec trying to get a handle on it, and I find I
have a number of questions. The answers are not immediately clear to
me from reviewing the spec and supporting documents. I realize it's
very much a work in progress. Also, no doubt some of these are just
because of my thick head. But here goes:

* The spec says that SVG inherits all text properties from CSS2. Does
  this include justification (the 'text-align' property)?

* Does an SVG implementation ever do line-breaking of text?

* If a font contains kerning and ligature info, does an SVG renderer
  apply these transformations?

* If yes, and the font is in Type1 format, and if the font is
  specified by download, how does the SVG renderer find the
  corresponding .afm (font metrics) file?

* How does one specify a precise font in any other way than by
  downloading? In particular, how would an SVG document specify the
  difference between Adobe Times (in Type1 format, say), and Monotype
  Times (in TrueType format, say)?

* If the precise font is specified by download, and the renderer
  implements CSS2 "intelligent matching", is the precise font to be
  ignored in favor of the matched font?

* Assuming that font matching takes place and that the font used in
  rendering is subtly different than the font used in authoring, what
  is the expected behavior? The left side aligns correctly, but the
  right side may be incorrect (i.e. more or less the PostScript way)?

* What are the semantics of the text-shadow property when there are
  multiple text elements sufficiently close that the shadows overlap?
  Is each text element rendered on its own alpha-transparent canvas,
  or do all the foreground glyphs get grouped over all the shadows?

* Is there any way for the creator of an SVG document to specify text
  that will (a) be rendered with the precise metrics intended and (b)
  will render correctly on all conforming SVG implementations?

  Thanks in advance for any insight on these questions.

Raph

P.S. I don't have a webpage yet about the planned Gnome SVG
implementation. We're going to be using the Gnome Canvas as the
rendering engine. This canvas fully supports antialiasing and
transparency, and we're going to be extending it to support the full
generality of the SVG imaging model (a Small Matter of Programming :).

More info about the Gnome Canvas can be found at this link:

http://www.gnome.org/devel/canvas/

Incidentally, there are a couple of references to "commercial
implementations" in the SVG spec (section 13.4 and some of the
conformance language). A better phrase would be "high quality
implementations", in my opinion.

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 1999 01:54:47 UTC