RE: Revisiting SVG Fonts

So long as we're meandering a bit on the topic of stretching the use of
fonts, I wanted to re-raise the issue of declarative randomness --

Things like <someSVGtag cx=random(20%, 80%) fill=
random(R(0,ff),G(88),B(random(88,ff)) > where a random position in a certain
range is provided in the context of a random color (restricted somewhat on R
and B but fixed at 88 on G). Not sure of the syntax.

It could be very handy for filling in random textures in backgrounds of
scenes, random breezes in our forests, and for creating a sort of
declarative noise (particularly in the context of <replicate>)

But in Boston two weeks ago, someone pointed out to me the sumptuousness of
a hand drawn blackboard-menu. The calligrapher had used chalk and had come
up with very clever ways of forming the glyphs. Some of it could be handled
with ligatures, but a part of the beauty of it was the unpredictable
humanness of the writing. The ability to insert randomness in our writing,
and indeed randomness in general imparts a great sense of realism to our
work. Client side declarative randomness is pretty necessary ¿que no?

Is this something for SVG 3.0 or 2.0? 

Cheers
David 

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Pritchard [mailto:chuck@jumis.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 6:27 PM
To: Erik Dahlstrom
Cc: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Revisiting SVG Fonts

> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:21:02 -0700, Charles Pritchard 
> <chuck@jumis.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>> What's the status of ligatures on those SVG Tiny viewers?
>>
>> Is there a maximum length that a ligature can be?
>> For instance, could 80 characters be used?
>
> There probably is some implementation-dependent limit yes. The spec 
> itself doesn't limit the string length for @unicode on <glyph>.
>
> I'm pretty sure it would work ok if you happened to have an 80 
> characters ligature in an svgfont, but it's not really a common case :)
>
>
Consider it a very nasty hack/work-around to display scanned text or 
hand-written text while maintaining machine readable DOM.

<text class="line1">first line of text</text>
or even:
<text>[unicode private char] another line of text</text>

I'm just brainstorming here, but it's been in my mind awhile... 
representing non-standard scripts, scanned text and hand-written text.

Of course it breaks down quickly when editing, but it does break-down 
into human readable form.

Thanks for engaging me in this. I'll take a peek inside some of the code 
bases to see what WebKit and Moz setup for their buffer lengths.

This thread has been about stretchin the use of SVG fonts (as well as 
implementing them sooner rather than later re: embedding svg in WOFF). 
So, I hope I didn't stray too far off topic.

-Charles

Received on Wednesday, 2 November 2011 00:46:39 UTC