Re: Fund-raising SVG Fonts development

We discussed SVG fonts a bit at the recent SVG WG F2F and one thing everyone
agreed on is that SVG fonts has a big problem with internationalization. In
particular the shaping support is very weak so SVG fonts don't work well for
many languages, such as most Indian languages, and also languages that rely
heavily on diacritics. Fixing that in SVG fonts for all the world's
languages is a very hard problem, but any long-term solution for the
use-cases that SVG fonts are supposed to address *must* solve that problem.

So I think we (by which I mean the entire SVG community) need to figure out
what the long-term solution is going to look like and figure out the best
way to get there. I think the answer is almost certainly going to be
leveraging OpenType shaping instead of building massive new shaping
infrastructure for SVG fonts. I want to have a discussion about this, and
hopefully arrive at some sort of consensus, and if it turns out that the
answer is not further development of SVG fonts, then I don't want to add
support for a technology that is a dead end.

Rob
-- 
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for
they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures
every day to see if what Paul said was true." [Acts 17:11]