Potential mentors for SVG Fonts, this is the final revision of my SoC&nbsp; application (as submitted today).<b><br><br>Abstract</b> <b><br><br></b>SVG
Fonts is a feature described on section 20 of the SVG 1.1 specification
that allows fonts to be described using SVG. It can be used to embbed a
font into an SVG document so that the author can be sure that the
document will be properly rendered in any SVG compliant viewer, not
depending on specific fonts being installed on the user&#39;s system.<br>
<br>SVG Fonts can also enhance acessibility of documents because text
is stored as strings in the xml file. This way, artwork containing text
can be read by screen reader software. Also, adaptation of artwork to
other languages is easier when text is stored in strings.<br>
<br>I will implement basic SVG Fonts rendering into Inkscape using Cairo&#39;s user-font support and Pango.<br><br><b>Detailed Description</b><br><br>1. About Me<br>2. My first contact with Inkscape<br>3. How I got interested on coding for inkscape<br>
4. Work done on Inkscape<br>5. What I intend to do on GSoC&#39;08<br>5.1 Parameter loading<br>
5.2 Laying out text and rendering<br>6. future ideas (not to be implemented for SoC&#39;08)<br>7. Off-topic notes<br>&nbsp;<br>1. About Me<br><br>My
name is Felipe C.orrêa da Silva Sanches, known on Inkscape community as
JucaBlues. I study Electrical Engeneering with emphasys on
Telecomunications on University of São Paulo, Brazil. My contributions
to Inkscape are described later on this SoC application.<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
<br>I like a lot to deal with computer graphics and I have been ploting
pixels since 11 years old, when I started to learn computer programming
by myself on an old 386 with QBASIC and MS-DOS. Later I learned C, C++
and x86 Asm. Recently I have also played a bit with javascript and
python.<br>
<br>Currently I am working 20 hours a week on web development (using
the django framework) on a brazilian startup. I will continue employed
there during SoC.<br><br></div>I have some small free software projects
started by myself. Often very small and unimportant stuff. During some
time I have contributed with bug reporting and feature requests to some
big projects such as Mediawiki and Firefox, and I have aprox. 3 tiny
lines of code incorporated in DemocracyTV (now called Miro), but I did
not get commit rights on those projects, so I won&#39;t count them. The
first big project I am involved with a lot of coding is Inkscape.<br>
<br>2. My first contact with Inkscape<br>I first heard about Inkscape
when I was looking for a free software drawing tool. I needed to draw
the schematics of wood cuts for my pinball machine(*). By that time
Inkscape was on version 0.43 and I remember I got very impressed by the
about screen drawing.<br>
<br>3. How I got interested on coding for inkscape<br>After some time I
started designing some SVG images for my hexamines game(**). I had to
set the CC-licensing metadata for a lot of files and I didn&#39;t know it
was possible to do it easily using templates, so I decided to write a
patch to make a &quot;default metadata settings&quot; UI. This patch, and a fix
to a bug in itself, gave me svn commit rights. Later, the patch was
considered confusing and not that much useful and was reverted. But
since I saw myself, for the first time, with commit access to a free
software project, I got excited about that and decided to pick
something to work on. I saw some work going on filters UI (Nicholas
Bishopp&#39;s SoC) and decided that filter renderers would be something
cool to implement.<br>
<br>4. Work done on Inkscape<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>Last year I have
implemented in Inkscape some of the SVG filter renderers. More
precisely, these ones: feTurbulence, feDisplacementMap, feFlood,
feColorMatrix, feConvolveMatrix, feImage, feMorphology and
feComponentTransfer. I have also worked a bit on the filters user
interface. I have implemented the filters infobox (which gives users
instructions on what each filter primitive does). I have designed all
of the icons used on this infobox(***). I have also added all of the
tooltips for the filters UI.<br>
<br>I have recently adapted the 0.46 About Screen to some languages, based on advice given by people at inkscape-translator list.<br><br></div>5. What I intend to do on GSoC&#39;08<div class="Ih2E3d"><br><br>Basic SVG Font rendering support. This does not include UI for the SVG Fonts.<br>

<br></div>5.1 Parameter loading<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>Some time ago I
started work on sp-font.{cpp,h}, sp-glyph.{cpp,h},
sp-missing-glyph.{cpp,h} and sp-glyph-kerning.{cpp,h}. These are not
functional yet. I intend to complete their implementation, so that svg
parameters related to SVG Fonts are correctly parsed. This will
probably also need refactoring (as I understand that having these
implemented as C++ classes is a main target for 0.47) I will need
advice on the refactoring part of this task. (or, alternativelly, I
will look at already refactored code in order to find out)<br>
<br></div>5.2 Laying out text and rendering<br>I intend to write code
that uses Pango to layout text that uses SVG Fonts and then use the new
user-font support on Cairo to render it. Although I have never used
Pango and Cairo before, so this is the part of my SoC work where I
mostly need advice.<br>
<br>I have been chatting about this on irc and on the inkscape-devel
list.&nbsp; Cworth told me that Cairo 1.6 will have this new user-font
feature which will be useful for the task. I was wondering when the
release will be so that we have time to incorporate it during SoC.
Since Cairo 1.6 is scheduled for Ubuntu Hardy, I think we shouldn&#39;t
worry. Also, since Behdad, the developer of user-font, is also
maintainer of Pango, we can hopefully have the proper Pango support
soon, also.<br>
<br>Probably, a first step would be to render SVG Fonts which describe
their glyphs using only the d &quot;path&quot; attribute. Once this works, I can
work on loading general glyphs which use arbitrary SVG.<br><br>6. future ideas (not to be implemented for SoC&#39;08)<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
Here I include some ideas that I would possibly work on after I finish the SoC tasks.<br><br>- SVG Fonts to TrueType (or other font formats) conversion and vice-versa<br></div>- SVG Fonts User Interface<br><br>7. Off-topic notes<br>

(*) You can see my (not yet finished) homebrew pinball machine at <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/felipesanches" target="_blank">www.flickr.com/photos/felipesanches</a><br>(**) <a href="http://code.google.com/p/hexamines/" target="_blank">http://code.google.com/p/hexamines/</a><br>

(***) The bird photograph was shot by my daddy. If you are interested, you can take a look at his work at <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariosanches" target="_blank">www.flickr.com/photos/dariosanches</a><br><br>