Re: altglyph

Hi Paul,

At 09:08 AM 9/22/99 -0700, Paul Topping wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've been reading Section 12.6, "Ligatures and alternate glyphs", of the SVG
>spec where the "altglyph" attribute is described. I'm a little confused as
>to the details of altglyph.

In the August 12 spec, 'altglyph' is a CSS property, not an attribute.
Since it is a property, it can be specified as part of an external style
sheet, as part of an internal style sheet via a <style> element, or within
an inline style via the 'style=' attribute, which is available on most
elements in SVG.

The international working group has a strong interest in 'altglyph' as it
has considerable utility in a variety of scenarios, including Japanese.
Also, 'altglyph' has applicability to other XML grammars such as XHTML.
They have given feedback to the SVG working group that questions whether
CSS properties are the best approach for 'altglyph'. There is a chance that
'altglyph' could change from a property to an element or an attribute.

>
>- It is not clear to me what element this is an attribute of. Is it the
>"text" element? I couldn't find altglyph mentioned in the DTD.

With the August 12 spec, because 'altglyph' is a property, it can be
specified in all of the ways I have described earlier. However, it only
makes sense to specify it on a "text" element.

>
>- The description under the "Unicode" value leads one to believe that it
>describes a string of characters, whereas that of the "gyphid" value sounds
>like it describes a single character.

The original idea was the only one Unicode value would be provided, but
again this is subject to change in response to Last Call feedback.

>
>Can anyone shed any light on this attribute?
>
>Paul Topping
>pault@mathtype.com
>Design Science, Inc. 

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Received on Wednesday, 22 September 1999 16:47:55 UTC