Re: SVG 2 Features and Approach

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Jelle <pjmulder@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> I would be severely disappointed if SVG fonts are taken out of the standard
> to protect the vested interests of the type foundries, pdf and ps.

The removal of SVG fonts from the SVG2 spec has absolutely nothing to
do with foundries.  (I didn't even realize there *was* an angle there
until I read your message.)  It's entirely because browsers haven't
implemented them beyond a smattering of basic support, and have stated
that they don't plan to in the future.  Ultimately a spec is only
useful if it documents reality, and the reality is that the SVG Fonts
spec isn't usable in browsers.

> This is
> the only text based font type and would be a blessing for anyone needing to
> handle subsets of fonts. A whole traditional Chinese font is huge in any
> format except for SVG, it would allow for handwritten font types or
> dynamically created ones as well and the whole diacritics issue is something
> I think should be handled by the authoring software rather than the fonts.
> Those have rules of where to place things surely that could be solved with
> "fft" rules etc. in Unicodes and the according glyphs. It may become an
> unholy mess for some uses, but I guess software would find a solution to
> handling that as well. A simple keyGlyph that would tell any renderer what
> code the first letter in the alphabet is in the whole string should help out
> for wide ranged fonts as well.

Note that, while SVG Fonts is getting dropped from SVG2 (or put into a
module, or whatever), we're separately pursuing the ability to put SVG
into a Truetype font for the outlines.  It already works in some
(private?) version of Firefox, and I think has mild support from the
other browsers.

> The whole concept of SVG fonts is way too
> cool and useful to disregard for some ugly binary format like Woff that only
> type specialist can or want to use. Font hinting?,.. well maybe some better
> rendering algorythm?

Note that WOFF1 is just the TTF format with an extra header and
optional compression.  WOFF2 is a more advanced version of the format
with much stronger compression, and is very suitable for CJK fonts
because of this.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 7 January 2013 20:28:05 UTC