Re: SVG 1.2 Comment: 4 Flowing text and graphics

On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, Peter Sorotokin wrote:
> 
> For SVG we want reproducible layout and definitely we want basic line 
> breaking rules to be in the spec. This is graphics, after all. 
> Hyphenation definitely is lower priority and is not allowed unless soft 
> hyphen is explicitly used. This goal is different from CSS.

Why don't authoring tools automatically perform multiline flow over 
multiple <text> elements, then? This wouldn't require any additions to 
SVG, it would be purely an authoring-time problem. This would free up 
rendering user agents from having to do any line breaking work, and would 
allow authoring tools to compete on the quality of their flowing text 
implementations.

For interoperability between authoring tools, you could also introduce an 
attribute on <text> to point to the next <text> element, and an attribute 
to point to the graphical element (which could be in a <defs> element) 
which should be used to do the flowing.

This would let you get all the flowing text behaviour you get now with SVG 
1.2, including being completely interoperable between rendering agents, 
_and_ would be completely backwards-compatible with existing UAs, since 
the two new attributes could be ignored by everyone except authoring tools 
that want to support flowing text.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 3 November 2004 23:37:07 UTC