[Openfontlibrary] SVG Fonts as a replacement for EOT?

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Dave,

I don't have time to look at how they are doing this specifically.

I previously thought about doing a similar thing.  In my version, I was
going to have a C++ program on the server using Pango and Freetype to get at
the glyph outlines and then just spit out the outlines as SVG vectors.  I
wasn't even going to use the SVG font specification -- just plain SVG
graphics.  But of course I never got around to doing it.

So instead I wrote the version that spits out PNG files using Cairo -- PNG
files provide a cross-browser solution while SVG does not.

In a similar vein, one can also imagine a program that would generate CANVAS
graphics.  Combined with Google's CANVAS-to-IE-VML javascript package, such
a contrivance could probably be cross-browser.

But why bother? Liam says you can now embed a CFF font in an SVG document,
but it sounds like only the Adobe plugin actually support that -- and even
then, does it really support the advanced OpenType features needed for many
scripts and orthographies?  I kind of doubt it ...

The better solution is to have browser support for the @font-face rules.
That way the browser can take advantage of either
Freetype-Pango-HarfBuzz-Cairo or the OS' native support for OpenType
features.  And maybe someday we will also have Graphite integration in the
FOSS type rendering stack too, which would also be very beneficial.

With WebKit under the hood, Google's Chrome browser will be easily able to
support @font-face as soon as the developers decide to turn this feature
on.  So then we will have Safari and Chrome with @font-face support.  And
doesn't Opera have it too?  We'll have to see where Firefox falls out on
this -- I don't currently understand the state of progress on @font-face
support in FF.

In any case, as George Williams points out, Dojo's solution doesn't change
anything on the licensing front.  Is the Dojo developer Tom Trenka really
suggesting that their SVG solution avoids licensing issues?  If so, I wonder
what he was smoking?

Best - Ed Trager

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Those smart dojotoolkit guys have been thinking about web fonts and
> come up with some very clever stuff :-)
>
> http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/09/08/custom-fonts-with-dojoxgfx/
>
> Here's the 'serious' demo:
>
> http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/demos/fonts/demo.html
>
> And here's the 'fun' demo which I think has A LOT of potential for OFLB:
>
> http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/demos/fonts/comic.html
>
> I guess its not as internationalised as Ed Trager's stuff, but it
> might complement them, for example giving charts of charset coverages:
>
> http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/demos/fonts/charts.html
>
> --
> Regards,
> Dave
>
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