Now that Inkscape can see all font styles, futher problems emerge.
The biggest problem is that SVG uses CSS, and the premise of CSS is different from that of a design app. CSS was designed to get "as close as possible" font rendition on a wide variety of platforms. The goal of a design app is to render the font _exactly_ so long as it is available on the system.
The font selection properties used by CSS include family, style, weight, variant, and stretch. Each property has a fixed limited set of values:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#FontPropertiesUsedBySVG
Of these, currently supported by Inkscape (to some extent) are only style (italic or normal) and weight. However, even if all these properties are fully supported, Inkscape _would still be unable to reproduce some fonts_. Take a look at the list of fonts in the Caslon family here:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=904962&gro...
It has many variants that CSS simply cannot handle: Swash, Alternates, Old style figures, Expert, etc. I think it is unacceptable for Inkscape to ignore any fonts simply because CSS cannot describe them appropriately.
So, I think the only acceptable (although unelegant) solution is to introduce a two-tier font specification. Namely, I propose to introduce <text> attributes
inkscape:font-family inkscape:font-style
that will hold the family and style exactly as reported by the OS, without attempting to parse them into weight, stretch etc. These will have precedence over CSS in Inkscape and will allow it to reliably use any installed fonts. For non-Inkscape renderings, the CSS specification will work as before (although it probably needs to be improved to handle more of the CSS properties and values).
Comments?
_________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2f...