David,
I've been a graphics designer since 1994 using a plethora of software for graphics design. My guess is that this styling parameter is related to the use of SVG fonts, rather than ttf, ott, woff or type1. Most of the latter have such a wide variety of badly characterized font sets, that you can negate the setting. During all my years a s a designer I certainly never let such settings decide what font to use and most of the time a condensed or narrow letter is defined in a special font, doing only that, but often in italic and bold as well as normal.
For SVG fonts however, it would make sense, as you have much more control over SVG fonts than over any of the others through the SVG interpreter implementation. As SVG fonts are not really all that supported (Mozilla stubbornly refuses to implement even SVG fonts Tiny for whatever reason), the style setting wont have much use at this moment. I don't think Inkscape should try to support it at this time within its current tool set. I'd much rather have a limited support of SVG fonts for that matter, so designers can finally make their show cases to send to those MF's at Mozilla and press them to finally support the SVG standard.
Jelle Mulder
Message: 1 Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:01:12 -0700 From: mathog <mathog@...1176...> Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Narrow/Condensed fonts, font-stretch, any real utility? To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <4dfdde417aaefcf72737d2566a645718@...2855...> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
SVG style has a font-stretch parameter, however, as near as I can tell it does not do anything. Set it to Normal or Condensed and nothing changes, for either "Arial" or "Arial Narrow". When a condensed font (Arial Narrow) is specified font-stretch says "Normal" even though the font used is actually condensed. Just to make life really miserable, FontConfig matches "Arial Narrow" on linux to "DejaSans", it only gives "DejaVuSansCondensed" if the font name used is "Arial Narrow:width=75" or "Arial:width=75". Near as I can tell Inkscape does not pick up from the font name alone that "Arial Narrow" is a condensed font. It is possible to force the issue by editing the SVG to
font-family:Arial Narrow:width=75;
in style, in which font-stretch will be set to Condensed. However on linux it is of little use because both of the Deja fonts are so much wider than "Arial Narrow" that the rendered text invariably overruns whatever text follows it. (This was with separate <text> sections, imported from an EMF file. If the pieces are put together with sequential <tspan>s then the text shifts around, but it does not overlap.)
Copying the Arial Narrow file ARIALN.TTF from a Windows system to the linux font directory let Inkscape render text in that font at the proper size, but this isn't a general solution since it isn't a "free" font.
Other SVG viewers (ie, Firefox) also seem to be mostly "miss" when it comes to rendering condensed/font-stretch SVG.
What's the consensus - is this style parameter supposed to do more, in particular, emulate somehow a narrow or wide font from the base font? Is it best to just avoid condensed fonts altogether?
Thanks,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech