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

[Ed Trager]

A FontForge script would be sufficient for showing individual glyphs
or even laying out text for simple scripts like Latin, Greek,
Cyrillic, etc.  But don't forget that it would be insufficient for
showing text in complex text layout (CTL) scripts like Arabic and
Devanagari ...  for those you need a shaper library like Pango or
Uniscribe.

-- Ed

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Daniel Johnson
<il.basso.buffo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Ed Trager <ed.trager at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It would be trivial to write a FontForge script that generated an SVG
> font anytime someone uploaded a new .otf, .ttf or .sfd file.  However,
> browser support for SVG fonts is virtually nonexistent.  As I recall
> reading, Firefox support for SVG fonts missed the 3.1 feature
> deadline.  It's possible to turn an SVG font into a series of standard
> SVG shapes; all you need to do is a vertical flip and some scaling --
> a simple "transform" attribute on the <g> element surrounding the
> glyph.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>