On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 21:39 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On 3/29/11, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
- SVG Fonts
Wasn't there a plan to redo them in 2.0? Or am I mixing things up?
It is still being debated. They will probably be kept but in a separate module.
There are those who find SVG fonts invaluable and those who loath them. Use on the web is held up by the lack of support in Firefox and IE (IE chose what to support by taking a union of the things supported in the most popular browsers at the time they began working on SVG support).
Font use can be divided into two classes. The first being artistic use such as found on posters. Here SVG fonts are excellent as they can be manipulated in different ways while still maintaining the semantics of the text (important for search-ability and for accessibility). The second class of font use is the layout of large sections of text as in an article. In this case, one is more concerned about the legibility of the text and the finer details of typesetting including the ability to handle complex writing systems. SVG fonts aren't as good for this purpose (this is why, I think Firefox has resisted implementing them). For this class of use, some people want to rely on other font technologies (e.g. woff) or in letting browsers handle the text (e.g. embedding HTML in SVG). I think both types of font use should be supported but most of the advocates for keeping or replacing SVG fonts think it is an either/or situation. For the Inkscape community, I think SVG fonts would be a real asset.
Tav