well... in general terms, what I need to do is:
Render glyphs (a) using paths described using the same syntax as path:d attribute or (b) using arbitrary chunks of SVG drawing.
I have built two examples and attached to this message their respective rendering in batik.
example1: (batik output: svgfont-batik.png)
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <svg width="400px" height="300px" version="1.1" xmlns = 'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'> <defs> <font id="Font1" horiz-adv-x="1000"> <font-face font-family="Super Sans" /> <glyph unicode="!" d="M0,0h500v500h-500z"> <circle r='500' cx='500' cy='500' style="fill:none;stroke:green;"/> </glyph> <glyph unicode="@" d="M500,500h500v500h-500z"> <circle r='250' cx='500' cy='500' style="fill:blue;"/> </glyph> </font> </defs> <text x="100" y="100" style="font-size:70;font-family:'Super Sans';fill:red;">A!@A</text> </svg>
The squares are drawn using the path description in the glyph:d attribute The circles are arbitrary SVG declared in the childNode of the glyph nodes.
example 2: (batik output: svgfont-batik-kerning.png)
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <svg width="400px" height="300px" version="1.1" xmlns = 'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'> <defs> <font id="Font1" horiz-adv-x="1000"> <font-face font-family="Super Sans" /> <glyph unicode="!" d="M0,0h500v500h-500z"> <circle r='500' cx='500' cy='500' style="fill:none;stroke:green;"/> </glyph> <glyph unicode="@" d="M500,500h500v500h-500z"> <circle r='250' cx='500' cy='500' style="fill:blue;"/> </glyph> <hkern u1="!" u2="@" k="1000" /> </font> </defs> <text x="100" y="100" style="font-size:70;font-family:'Super Sans';fill:red;">A!@A</text> </svg>
It is the same as example 1 except that this one has a hkern tag which specifies the kerning between the chars ! and @ With the kerning value k=1000, the two glyphs will overlap so that the center of the circles will be the same and the squares will have a common vertice.
What is needed to make inkscape render this? I suppose that I should provide the kerning info to cairo userfonts and then cairo-user-fonts would call my glyph-rendering functions providing me the proper x,y coordinates. But how do I enable this behaviour just for Super Sans font? I guess there must be a way of registering new fonts with pango. I just don't see exactly how these pieces fit together.
Juca
On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Gail Carmichael <gail.banaszkiewicz@...400...> wrote:
Hey Felipe, I forwarded some of the conversation I had with the Pango folks in case it helps. One issue me right now is that I haven't done any specific research regarding SVG fonts (since that wasn't my project). So I'm not completely familiar with what you need to do.
What I was going to do originally was simply to attempt getting Pango to be able to "store" information about more fonts, since the structures we are currently using in memory can't describe anything beyond what CSS can do. The font-specification attribute I added to the style for text is a string generated by Pango and describes a font fully as a result. If I could get Pango to be able to describe more fonts, then the font-specification would in turn be used to represent these fonts in XML (while including as much of the CSS attributes as possible for other programs or for Inkscape to fall back on).
I hope that helps clarify what's going on on my end...?
Gail
