Re: SVG Fonts [...]

On 6/2/10 8:18 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>
>     When was the last time a web developer designed so much as one
>     glyph in an Opentype font?
>     Have you?
>
>
> Nope. But there are an awful lot of Opentype fonts around, and people 
> spend a lot of time making them.
>
>     Yet Illustrator, Corel Draw, Inkscape _all_ generate content with
>     SVG fonts.
>
>
> How often to people use them to generate SVG fonts, though? Or SVG at all?
This has to do with opening a file and displaying it; nothing to do with 
the generation of fonts.
You can translate fonts across standards, it is, at times, a lossy process.

There's a reasonable chance of success, of processing an SVG file using 
ECMAScript
and existing browsers. Rendering an SVG file with some fidelity to the 
embedded
profile, whether falling back on VML, the HTML Canvas Tag, or other 
technology,
is doable with SVG Fonts, and far more difficult with only a WOFF binary.

SVG Fonts can make for a single, compact file.
The <use> tag hasn't been a winner in that scenario.
Though lacking typical typography features (hinting, etc) it's easier
on implementers than open type.

...

You can certainly take an open type font, convert it to a basic SVG Font 
(lacking a lot of data),
and use it quickly in an illustration, and share that one illustration 
as one .svg file. Font authoring
environments don't seem relevant; if the authoring environment is 
in-browser;
we again stumble on the issue.

By committing solely to WOFF, SVG - ECMAScript font generation would be 
hackish at best,
as would embedded font resources. WOFF could work with with data:-url, 
but that's stretching things.

In most cases, an SVG file will not include the full font, but only a 
subset of glyphs, possibly
to be viewed independently of a web browser.

For mass distribution, on internet-connected sites, mainly for HTML, 
WOFF fonts make a lot
more sense, of course. So do other binary file formats, and I'm glad to 
see WOFF accepted.
And I'm glad to see an HTML+SVG profile becoming more of a reality.

-Charles