- From: Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au>
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 22:35:20 +1000
- To: David Dailey <ddailey@zoominternet.net>
- CC: 'Erik Dahlstrom' <ed@opera.com>, 'John Daggett' <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, 'Dirk Schulze' <dschulze@adobe.com>, 'Nikolas Zimmermann' <zimmermann@kde.org>, 'SVG public list' <www-svg@w3.org>
David Dailey: > In addition to the cases that Cameron found on the web, we also have various instructional materials that were written relying on the spec including books and other materials such as http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html#text . Future authors will be using kerning since that is what the spec said and hence what the instructional materials say. Luckily that primer is on a web site that should be easy to update. > Losing the ability to do character by character kerning, which apparently is included in the proposal to deprecate would represent a step backward for authors abilities to mimic effects used in advertising and logos and, accordingly, for accessibility, by forcing authors to use bitmaps instead of fonts to convey stylistic effects such as in http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/GeometricAccessibility.html -- the world is replete with such examples, I believe. Allowing CSS to dictate the terms for SVG graphics harms accessibility, art and sensibility. Note that you won't lose the ability to manually control the kerning of glyphs -- you will be able to use the letter-spacing property to specify any additional offset to use between glyphs, and the font-kerning property to turn off automatic kerning (based on information in the font). Yes, you would need to wait until the font-kerning property is implemented, but currently the kerning property is not widely supported and so authors cannot current rely on it. (Also of course you can manually position each individual glyph, ignoring the craziness of specifying positions by characters in the DOM rather than per glyph from the font.)
Received on Thursday, 31 May 2012 12:36:26 UTC