From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2003 - 09:20:12 EDT
On Sunday, July 20, 2003 2:21 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
> > With SVG graphics containing character objects and drawing
> > primitives
>
> I have no idea what this means. I used Fontographer.
SVG is a W3C-promoted standard for Scalable Vector Graphics,
based on a XML language, and allowing to describe vector
graphics with 2D primitives, and it can be used to produce
custom "fonts" of symbols, in a more appealing way than with
bitmaps.
A SVG graphic can be used at the source URL of an <img />
or <object /> element within HTML. Most vectorial graphic tool
can generate or conert their proprietary format with SVG, used
as a lingua franca for vector graphics interchanges (deprecating
legacy proprietary formats like MacDraw and WMF, or the many
other formats created by every drawing tool on the market).
SVG graphics are now very popular and recognized by many
publishing layout engines, and they are great for many websites
that wish to compute and generate dynamic graphics (because
these graphics can be updated online with its DOM tree, and
easily generated from templates by XSLT processors).
The palette of SVG primitives is rich and includes many
presentation features (including colors, shading, transparency
effects, regions combining operators). Recent versions of
MS-Office use SVG within their new XML document format to
embed graphics, or presentation effects, without the limitations
of HTML.
When I look at the Apple's Developer page, all what I see in
the table of glyphs and in the description can be represented
with a SVG graphic, including Unicode-encoded text primitives
for the representative glyph chosen in their table. In a first
approach, each defined PostScript name can be bound to
a SVG filename, and a font can be made from it, by packing
all these SVG in a ZIP archive, which can also contain
description tables. Then any font format can be derived from
this editable format.
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