RE: Flowing text in SVG2

Ditto to your request, Anatoly!

 

One of the arguments we make in our 2011 paper on text and accessibility in SVG [1], is that if things like this aren’t done in SVG, then web authors will do what they always have to date: make bitmaps to display these effects, hence undermining accessibility.

 

Has anyone looked at the new US guidelines on accessibility to see if the web standards community will feel more pressure than previously to make sure that SVG can handle text so that fancy text effects are not always handled as bitmaps?

 

I hope SVG x will handle text flow into shapes and glyph warping into shapes (as requested in the public opinion phases of brainstorming a couple of years ago) for some x<5.

 

Cheers

David

 

 

[1] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/GeometricAccessibility.html 

 

From: anatoly techtonik [mailto:techtonik@gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 4:20 PM
To: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: Flowing text in SVG2

 

Hi Dear Sirs and Madams,

 

I am writing you on behalf of Inkscape and Chromium community to ask.

 

What is the flowed text http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/flow.html replacement in the next more advanced and awesome SVG2?

 

I am asking, because it seems to be a valuable feature for Inkscape - http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Creating.html#Text-Enter-Flow that allows to insert linebreaks automatically for text inside some shape. Right now Inkscape uses flowRoot and friend elements, which were not adopted in SVG1.2. Does SVG2 include this user story? Does it consider this feature useful? If not, then why? If this user story is not covered, then what alternative is proposed?

 

I am asking, because I author SVG files in Inkscape and can not view them on Chrome, which is very disappointing - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=225660 - especially considering that SVG is meant to be web format. As you may see Chromium authors are full with uncertainties too

 

There are rumors that automatic linefeed insertion belongs to HTML. I frankly, do not understand the arguments, reasoning and how it should work. Does that need Inkscape to be shipped with Webkit, which will execute HTML inside the box? That sounds like an overkill for the linefeed problem.

 

Please give us an extensive answer to your position. We wholeheartedly trust you, but nevertheless are very worried about the practical side of SVG2 for us, ordinary users.

 

Thanks. Please CC.

-- 
anatoly t.