Re: Revisiting SVG Fonts

Hi Charles,

--Original Message--:
>On 31/10/2011 19:30, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>
>> I wanted to bring forward my strongest disagreement with Mozilla's stance
>> against SVG font support.
>
> From the 1.1.2 spec it is not clear to me (being dense) whether or not SVG 
>fonts are meant to enable the production of multicoloured, or otherwise 
>decorated fonts.

Yes, the SVG 1.1 recommendation as it stands supports font
glyphs containing arbitrary SVG content, so multi-colour
etc. is all possible.

>I would like to be able to create glyphs like this sort of thing:
>
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Eastern_Railway_Dynamometer_Car_National_Railway_Museum_York_Object_Number_1975-7050.jpg
>
>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carousel.jpg
>
>It seems to me that this is precisely the kind of thing SVG is supposed to 
>be for, and that no other potential mechanism exists.
>
>It seem to me that it should be possible to take pretty much any piece of 
>SVG code, with CSS, maybe even with animation of the outline, or whatever, 
>and to declare it to be a character in MySpecialDisplay.SVGfont so that I 
>can use it to assemble text.
>
>It seems to me that it should be possible to do this all within SVG
>without having to get involved in some other rigmarole.
>
>If SVG fonts is supposed to make this possible then this is a definite yes, 
>please. And if not, why not?

It is a definite yes. However, the level of support in different
browsers/SVG implementations varies. Mozilla and IE support
no part of any SVG font capability yet.

All SVG Tiny viewers shipped on close to a billion devices
so far support the Tiny sub-set of SVG fonts, which supports
only one path. That is limited in usefuleness since it doesn't
give you much over a True/OpenType font but can be useful
for embedded devices where system fonts may not be available
or reliable display of content is needed.

A few SVG viewers support Full fonts, notably the Batik
toolkit which is an excellent example of how to 'do' SVG.

Alex

>-- 
>Charles Lamont
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2011 00:03:53 UTC