Re: Fwd: SVG Fonts

On Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 10:10:56 PM, Robert wrote:

ROC> 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.


ROC> But what are they used for that a custom, downloadable TTF/OTF font could
ROC> not be used for?

They tend to be used for short, decorative, one-off text strings. Kerning, glyph shapes may be modified for the one pieve of artwork.

They can be used for less common languages.

The glyphs don't have the same constraints that TT/OT glyphs have, in terms of placement of control points, winding rule, avoidance of overlap and self-intersection. They can mix cubics, quadratics, and straight line segments as needed. 

In other words, if you can draw it, you can make it a glyph. And the SVG engine can already render it because it already knows about paths, fill, stroke, opacity etc.

Of course, the temptation is to just draw something which looks, visually, like text. SVG gives the option to make it real, searchable, accessible and updatable text, for very little more effort.


-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:[email protected]
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG