text-align and full justification

SVG does not support the 'justify' option for 'text-align'.

A number of other powerful mechanisms are available for precise
text positioning. There is the 'word-spacing' option, and
better still, "x" and "y" attributes allow you to specify the
position of each glyph.

The problem is that computing the exact position of each
glyph in advance (i.e., during creation of the SVG drawing) only
works if the exact font is available when the drawing needs to
be rendered. If not the result will be less than optimal.

Sometimes the renderer (the 'user agent') is in a better 
position to do the justification. For example, if the font
specified by the SVG drawing is not available, and the
renderer substitutes a font that looks very similar. (e.g.
Arial instead of Helvetica.) Although the font looks very 
similar, the width table may not be identical.

In this case, if the SVG drawing specifies the position of
each glyph the result will not be very nice. Some glyphs may
end up too close to each other and others may be too far apart. 
In this circumstance it is best to take advantage of the
renderer's intelligence and let it do the justification.

What is needed is a way to delay computing of exact glyph 
positions until the metrics of the font used for final rendering
is known.

However the SVG specification has no provision to let the
exact position of the glyph to be calculated at the last
minute.

It would be nice to have a way to specify that "this run of text 
is supposed to occupy this width."

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Received on Monday, 6 September 1999 22:24:05 UTC