Re: SVG Fonts

On Sep 7, 11:36 am, Robert O'Callahan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 4/09/09 6:39 PM, svgNick wrote:
>
> > Are there any plans to implement SVG fonts in Firefox?   By SVG fonts
> > I mean the font tag defined in the SVG spec as distinct from fonts
> > installed on the user computer.   An example of what I'm talking about
> > is the Chess
> > Sophia Font produced by Max Froumentain formely of W3C.
>
> > the first part of it looks like this:
> > <font horiz-adv-x="0">
> > <font-face font-family="ChessSophia" units-per-em="1000" panose-1="0 0
> > 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" ascent="1000" descent="0" alphabetic="0"/>
> > <missing-glyph horiz-adv-x="500" d="M63 0V1000H438V0H63ZM125
> > 63H375V938H125V63Z"/>
>
> Recently I've been wondering what the actual need is for SVG fonts. What
> can SVG fonts do that you can't do with a custom Truetype/Opentype font?
>
> Rob

SVG allows you to specify or embed a font in a document & be sure the
user will not get a lot of missing-glyph symbols when a suitable font
is not installed on their machine.
My special interest is chess - there are Unicode points for all pieces
but very few fonts implement them (Arial Unicode MS &/or  MS Gothic in
windows).
SVG fonts also work well with Apache FOP (implementation of xsl-fo).
This can save you the trouble of generating a font metrics file from
an installed ttf when the font you want is not one of the 14 core pdf
fonts.
Another thing I like about SVG fonts is that anyone who can specify a
path can avoid copyright issues by developing their own font.