Re: Fund-raising SVG Fonts development

Thanks for your answer Robert,

I admit I don't know this subject well. But SVG Fonts include
"unicode", "lang", "arabic-form", "horiz-origin-x" and "horiz-adv-x" to support right to left text and "vert-origin-y", "vert-adv-y" up to bottom
text, "ideographic", and more ...

You are probably right about OpenType shaping, but :

Isn't it enough for a start ?

Can't we wait for SVG 2.0 for Indian and diacritics languages (with
all my respect to Indian and diacritics readers) ?

My (and others designers) whole point is that SVG Fonts are not a
substitute for regular text : in this perspective, WOFF will always
be better shaped, and you will always be right : it's build on top
of a 20 years old technology !

SVG Fonts are interesting in a particular context : for graphics,
and design, like in Scalable Vector Graphics.
In such a context, diacritics aren't a key argument for not
implementing SVG Fonts.

What we expect is not that SVG Fonts works in every scenario right
know. We cannot demonstrate SVG Fonts potential with current
technology. We cannot animate a glyph in any browser right know for
example.

Proposal is : let's start slowly with basic SVG Fonts elements as a
technological preview, as it as always happened during the past 10
years with SVG. Build slowly on that. It will not be done quickly,
and we can't solve everything before to start. WOFF is based on
Opentype, which is based on True type, which was based once on a
poor ASCII text rendering technology were diacritics were not a
priority.

my best regards,

yagraph

PS: sorry for my english, I try my best.

Le 08/03/2011 00:07, Robert O'Callahan a écrit :

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]

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