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

Hi, Robert-

Robert Longson wrote (on 6/1/10 10:51 AM):
>
>>  I've been told by Dave Crossland (from Open Font Library, and an Invited
>>  Expert on the new Fonts WG), that there is a patch for SVG Fonts for
>>  Firefox, but that it hasn't been accepted.  I haven't verified this
>>  myself, but I assumed it was true.
>
> There is an old patch that implemented a small subset of SVG fonts
> (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490). The main issues
> with it are:
>
>     * Architecturally it is only designed to work with SVG. If we do SVG
>       fonts we'd want them to be able to be used by html, mathml etc.
>       SVG only initially would be OK as long as the architectural design
>       was extendable.

Right, any implementation should definitely work in HTML/MathML/WhateverML.


>     * It parses the glyph path every time it draws a glyph so it's
>       horribly slow.

Ouch.  At the worst, it should act like a <use> element.


>     * It no longer applies to the current codebase. This last is pretty
>       straightforward to fix in isolation.

Okay, thanks for the useful information.  It does sound like that is not 
an ideal patch.  Maybe someone from the community who's interested in 
SVG Fonts could take a look at what it would take to create a suitable 
patch.  Is it worth them looking at that patch, or would they be better 
off starting from scratch?

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Tuesday, 1 June 2010 15:14:29 UTC