Re: SVG Fonts [Re: Minutes, SVG WG Brussels f2f day 4 (Monday)]

I'm not a typography guy...  I don't have any technical arguments for SVG
Fonts.  It seems to be almost universally considered a poorer alternative
when compared to WOFF, with 'hinting' frequently mentioned as the primary
reason.

Personally I'd just like for all the major players in this space to settle
across the board on one font format for the web.  WOFF seems like the best
candidate to my inexperienced eyes but I did have one observation:

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:

> Actually there aren't. However, creating SVG Font support is not a big
> deal, at least up to the level of SVG Tiny 1.2 (which is all Opera and
> Webkit support). My concern about SVG Fonts is that they're just unnecessary
> for the Web platform.


Therefore the question is, what do SVG Fonts offer that WOFF can't?
> Considering SVG Tiny 1.2 Fonts, and not knowing what "overlaps" are, I've
> heard three suggestions:
> 1) More predictable rasterization
> 2) 3 points on the Acid3 test
> 3) Compatibility with SVG content that already uses SVG Fonts.
>

   4) Web typography on the iPhone and iPad

My understanding is that currently the only way to do web typography on
those devices is through SVG Fonts [1] [2].  This seems to have prompted a
variety of services to recently start supporting SVG Fonts (Typekit,
FontForge).  I have had no firsthand experience with this in any way.

In a similar way, the absence of Flash capability on those devices is seeing
an upsurge in experimentation using SVG and SMIL [3] [4].

Of course these could be temporal anomalies.

Do we know if WOFF is on its way for iPad?  It's clear to me what Mozilla
and Microsoft's current stances are - it's not clear what WebKit's stance
is.

"There seems to be very little SVG Fonts content on the Web that's not
testcases"

Just a guess, but there will probably be a rise in SVG fonts as a result of
the iPad, at least for content served to that device.  Do you consider "the
web as experienced on iPad and iPhone" a walled garden?  I don't.  But it is
a web with different capabilities.  I would guess RIM's future devices will
have very similar web capabilities.  I don't know if Opera Mobile supports
SVG Fonts or WOFF.  I don't know if Fennec supports WOFF but would guess it
does.

I realize this may be a touchy topic.

Regards,
Jeff

[1]
http://opentype.info/blog/2010/04/13/the-ipad-and-svg-fonts-in-mobile-safari/
[2]
http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/09/typekit-now-supports-fonts-for-the-ipad/
[3] http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/
[4] http://smokescreen.us/