- From: Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 15:47:04 +0200
- To: www-svg@w3.org
I think, the main advantage of SVG fonts is, that if an author needs 20 exactly defined glyphs for an SVG document, he can create them with the same tools as the other content of the document without the need to care about other formats or software. This is a very big advantage. It is an option to get high quality and predictable results, if this matters, with low efforts. Of course, if there is no such option or viewers to not interprete this option, many authors will just use a feature from programs like inkscape to convert text into inaccessible paths, difficult to edit afterwards and not readable anymore without the graphical representation. As usual taking the line of least resistance instead of learning a complete new format to get the same effect with much more efforts. If we compare it for example with the color-profile, at least I decided to defer understanding this feature for at least some more years after a short look on the specification of the profile format - leaving me with the open question, how to do it with a text editor or how to get some tool to identify what is in such a profile and how to create a new one. Indeed, I think, color-profile is not used very often - don't know if it is often implemented in typical SVG viewers. This can be the future as well for yet another cryptic font-format instead of the option to define glyphs simply with SVG for SVG documents. Yet another format instead of a simple SVG mechanism to define glyphs can frustate authors a lot, not really wanting to learn a complete new format, maybe including the efforts to look for new (free?) software just to define the appearance of 20 glyphs... If something is missing in the current SVG font definitions, why not to add it in an SVG 2.0 module for those, who want to use this for example on low resolution devices? As already done with the compatibility between SVG and CSS2.0, properties could be aligned as well with other popular font-formats to get some better compatibility or to provide an option for programs to transform the SVG font to another font format before using it, if this is simpler to implement. Olaf
Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2010 13:59:57 UTC