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

[Aaron Spaulding]

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Ed,

You're using Cairo for rendering the type specimens right? Could you
not just use a SVG Surface instead?

Aaron

Ed Trager wrote:
> 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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>>

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