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

[Ed Trager]

Hi, Aaron,

That's definitely worth looking into!

- Ed

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Aaron Spaulding
<professionalaaron at gmail.com> wrote:
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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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Konsulent, Fri Programvare / Free Software Consultant
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>>>
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>>>
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