Re: Fwd: SVG Fonts

On Sep 9, 3:10 pm, "Robert O'Callahan" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:51 AM, Chris Lilley <[email protected]> wrote:
> > To be clear - they already are useful and already are used. However,
> > content tends to break in Mozilla because they are not supported, so a
> > fallback font is used with greater or lesser breakage in terms of design
> > intent and legibility.
>
> But what are they used for that a custom, downloadable TTF/OTF font could
> not be used for?
>

The same question could be asked about Flash vs. Canvas/SVG.  The
point is that this:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/otff.htm
or
http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c052136_ISO_IEC_14496-22_2009(E).zip

do not look like the Web to me.  Do they to you?

Primarily because I cannot view source, I therefore cannot easily hack
the font or learn from the format directly.  I have to find a tool
(other than a text editor) and maybe read another several hundred page
technical document (we web developers already have a lot of those:
HTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, JavaScript).  It also doesn't take advantage of
existing skillsets (markup, DOM, SVG).

I've been told that TTF/OTF fonts can provide better hinting or
whatever.  That's great and I'm glad that browsers support @font-face
for this purpose, but to me this is something like the equivalent of
linking to a raster image: it's a binary blob.  As a developer I have
to do a lot more research to be able to view the source, hack it,
change it, inspect it, mash it up, etc.  This lowers the barrier of
entry and means that probably that many less people will do it.

Jeff