Re: SVG Fonts [...]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2010 10:30:05 +0200
Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:

> Personally it seems clear that both OpenType (as WOFF) and SVG Fonts
> have a place in SVG, serving different needs.

I totally agree. And let me add one more important usecase of SVG Fonts
for documents in Japan.

There are dozens of special characters that are not included in the
Unicode character set but are actually used in Japanese books and
literatures. It's called Gaiji.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Gaiji>

A set of pictorial characters (Emoji) for Japanese mobile phones is one
example of Gaiji, though the latest version of Unicode 6.0 is expected
to introduce many of these Emoji characters.

SVG Font in a embedded font form is great to represent Gaiji in SVG and
HTML5 documents, since the number of Gaiji characters is very limited
(typically one or two characters in modern novels). Some people use 'img'
elements and PNG images to represent Gaiji in HTML document, but SVG
Font could be much better solution because of its scalability.

I would like to see SVG Font widely supported in all major HTML5 browsers
so that many Japanese literatures could be viewed on normal Web browsers
and electronic document viewers without any loss of information.

-- 
Jun Fujisawa
<mailto:fujisawa.jun@canon.co.jp>

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 2010 05:46:36 UTC