[OpenFontLibrary] @font-face, is it really needed for font preview?

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Egil,

I and others have thought of this before too.  I think someone
connected to SIL's Graphite project worked on something along these
lines in order to support complex layout scripts like Burmese in the
current crop of SVG-aware but Burmese-not-aware browsers.

To write a server-side program that generates a bitmap image of text
is fairly simple.  To write a server-side program that generates the
SVG snippets instead is more work.  However such an SVG curve
generator would be pretty cool because then you could scale the text
dynamically on the client side, change colors using CSS, and generally
have a lot of fun playing around with the SVG outlines directly on the
client side.  So it would be quite cool if someone did it.

-- Ed


On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Egil Möller <egil.moller at freecode.no> wrote:
> Quite a few webbrowsers used today seems to support SVG images. Maybe
> rendering the preview to SVG (curves) would work?
>
> Khaled Hosny wrote:
>
> The new OFLB website uses @font-face CSS property for font preview, but
> I wonder if we really need it? Most browsers don't support it, even with
> the release of Firefox 3.1 we still have around 70% of web users with
> browsers that don't support it. Even if we put this aside, why I need to
> download a several megabits font just to get a static preview of it, it
> isn't even dynamic, what is the benefit (some Arabic or CJK fonts are
> even larger). Don't get me wrong, I find @font-face very great feature,
> but I think we are misusing it here.
>
> I think generating server side previews gives more better and responsive
> user experience, I think "font playground" already does this, just we
> need to merge it into the "main body" of the page instead of the current
> hidden (and annoying) separate popup (or whatever it is called).
>
> Regards,
>  Khaled
>
>
>
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