- From: David Dailey <ddailey@zoominternet.net>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:10:58 -0400
- To: "'Dr. Olaf Hoffmann'" <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>, <www-svg@w3.org>
I do not understand much of this discussion, but I'd like to. The related issues of character support, multi-language support (as through Unicode) and font consistency across browsers is something that, in teaching some recent classes to very multilingual audiences, opened my eyes to a plethora of inconsistencies in current browsers. How does one get Sigma( Xi - X [style="text-decoration: overline"])^^2 written as a proper formula for variance (with Greek letter and exponent) or eñe or è or Ä or '┐╕╣║' written in font-family serif in a way that will display consistently across browsers in SVG? Is there a simple "how-to" document somewhere that addresses these issues? My own experiments and those of my multi-lingual students have been hugely unsatisfying. Support for fonts that align to lines other than the baseline (like Indic), also seems quite spotty. On a related topic, for explaining to others, it would be nice if I understood: what is the current status of SVG fonts? Has WOFF eroded all resistance? I sort of got the sense from something I read recently, that SVG fonts are not dead, but I wasn't quite sure since the WOFF-buoy seems to be ubiquitous, now, in W3C harbors. In addition to the use case of client-side font design (that I am quite interested in), there is also the ability to squeeze text into shapes -- I use the word 'squeeze' rather than 'flow', as flowing refers more to the flow of paragraphs into non-rectangular containers. I'm talking about a very prevalent use case in advertising, logos and word art, of having the shape of the glyphs of a word, phrase or trademark conform to a non-linear baseline as well as a non-linear (and non-parallel) top-line, such as some of the examples explored here: http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/top-align.htm and http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/fontplay.htm . The NFL logo provides a simple example of what I mean. If we had access to the glyphs as paths, then we could at least, through script, squeeze glyphs into a new shape, using some simple physics. The 5 in the HTML5 logo is another example: no font-face conforms to that shape, but one could define a very 'tight' deformation that would compel the standard curvilinear '5' to adhere completely to its polygonal container. A looser deformation might still retain the curvilinearity. Accessibility concerns (of being able to render logos as text rather than as paths) would seem to recommend SVG fonts over WOFF. Other thoughts? I appreciate Cheers David -----Original Message----- From: www-svg-request@w3.org [mailto:www-svg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dr. Olaf Hoffmann Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 4:42 AM To: www-svg@w3.org Subject: Re: [Bug 12558] New: Support HTML's full set of character entities in SVG For example Opera does not want to interprete HTML entities for all versions of XHTML, therefore unfortunately the use of entities in no reliable way even for XHTML. In the last century it was a good method to be independent from the problem, that a server may send wrong encoding information about a document, because it does not analyse the encoding information in the document for XML and HTML. To provide an extension defining the entities for every XML document works pretty well, if needed. But of course if one starts to add the complete HTML list of entities, documents get pretty large. Therefore it is typically better to paste and copy such chararacters not directly available on the keyboard, because typically one has not the ability to keep in mind all unicode numbers to use them instead. This is not very friendly for authors, but there seems to be currently no alternative. And because SVG tiny 1.2 for example has no DTD anymore - and future versions of SVG may have no either, it can be difficult to define this - and even if this happens, this does not mean, that viewers care about such definitions, as can be seen with the XHTML DTDs and Opera for some versions of XHTML. Olaf
Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 12:11:26 UTC