RE: SVG Fonts - Is it the Font Standard of the future?

From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Mar 04 2004 - 01:14:20 EST

  • Next message: Antoine Leca: "Re: What's in a wchar_t string on unix?"

    > [Original Message]
    > From: Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com>
    >
    > It's interesting to note what the SVGMobile spec has to say about SVG
    > fonts:
    >
    > <quote>
    > SVGB and SVGT support a subset of SVG fonts where only the 'd' attribute
    > on the 'glyph' and 'missing-glyph' elements is available. Arbitrary SVG
    > within a 'glyph' is not supported.
    >
    > As with Full SVG 1.1, SVGB supports downloadable fonts using WebFonts
    > facility defined in the "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) level 2"
    > specification. In SVGT, an SVG font can be only embedded within the same
    > document that uses the font.
    > </quote>
    >
    > So, it sounds like you can include outline data (using the d attribute),
    > but nothing else -- not even the Unicode attribute (how can the thing be
    > useful?)!! There's no attempt to make the outline data more compact, and
    > they still envision SVG fonts only being embedded in SVG documents, not
    > as a standalone font format.

    I doubt if that was the intent there. There are two different glyph models.
    The simple one using the 'd' attribute which can only provide the shape,
    and a complex one where you can include arbitrary SVG. You can also
    combine the two using the 'd' attribute to provide the shape and SVG
    within the <glyph> element to provide special effects. All it is saying is
    that the arbitrary SVG that could be used to things like color gradients,
    animation, etc. is not used, only the shape as given by the 'd' attribute.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 04 2004 - 01:52:22 EST