RE: SVG2, the fondleslab keyboard initialisation and some other musings from the designers point of view.

Jelle,

I appreciate your drive to introduce support for text input and keyboard events but I am puzzled by the paragraph on fonts. If you need to display a predetermined static text fragment that is not going to change, then using a font subset instead of a full font with complete character repertoire definitely makes sense. Font subsetting isn't something that is a prerogative of SVG - fonts in "WOFF, OpenType or all those nice binary formats with hinting" can be subsetted to "save you some megabytes of data".

If, however, you want to support text input and keyboard events - you do need a font that supports full character set for a particular language/script. User text input is apriori unknown, some languages / scripts would also require support for complex shaping that SVG fonts aren't really good at - those nice binary formats do come handy in many ways. And, when you do need a full character repertoire, I believe those binary formats will also save you megabytes of data compared to same data expressed in a SVG font.

Regards,
Vladimir


On Monday, April 08, 2013 6:21 PM Jelle Mulder wrote:

> I couldn't find any
> thoughts on the issue of text input methods in SVG 2.0 and was
> wondering how this might be adressed. 
<snip/> 
> I it would be a
> godsend if there was a nice text input method that is being recognised
> by browsers as the trigger to init a keyboard if there is none
> physically attached to the device (speech would be another I guess).
> Can't find it in the draft for SVG 2 at least. As the SVG 2 is supposed
> to be a development for the future, it may be handy to discuss (again,
> no doubt) the desire to edit some text in situ rather than popping up
> some foreign object to enter text and pipe that back to the text you'd
> like to edit. Something sadly missing in 1.1
> 
<snip/>
> 
> Okay,.. sadly SVG fonts is not supposed to make it though it might save
> some megabytes of data having to be sent to those that don't need the
> full character sets of Tradional Chinese and the like that will have to
> be sent in WoFF, OpenType or all those nice binary formats with
> hinting. But surely you can feel for the desire of the graphics
> designers that SVG is ultimately geared for to replace the crud that
> has terrorised their eyes the past 20+ years.
>

Received on Tuesday, 9 April 2013 14:48:05 UTC