Haakon Meland Eriksen wrote:
I doubt embedding fonts is the way to go, if it was, why isn't it used?
There are really only 3 solutions: - destroy the text and serve make it paths but it will not be searchable and selectable anymore; - expect the user to have *all* the fonts installed on his system (not a chance in hell); - serve the font along with the page, either embedded or linked (large download size and problems with font distribution license). It seems no one of those is good enough.
Embedding fonts is not used because 1. Inkscape and other editors don't provide a nice GUI for it and 2. it will increase the file size (I believe embedded files are base64 encoded). And don't forget the font licenses.
Ah, good. Another problem is browser zooming with CTRL and + or CTRL and -. If you try this with Firefox 2.x, you will notice that only the text become bigger or smaller, not the rest of the SVG design.
Firefox 3 is close to release and it does full page zoom.
- Text is not treated as text by Firefox, which means you cannot search > and more seriously - you cannot select and copy (being mindful of > copyright or copyleft).
Yeah, the search does not work, but I believe the feature will be added to Firefox once it will be needed enough.As for select and copy, sure, it would be nice to have, but license-wise for the time being, the workaround of looking at the source and copying from there is not that bad.
You and I know this workaround is possible, but we are the minority. The majority report will be quite different: this sucks.
Chicken and egg: browsers will improve at a slow page until there are no pages made with SVG and we will not create SVG websites until the browsers are good enough. We can wait until the browsers improve (and hope the development will not be derailed by other priorities) or push SVG websites and force them to improve.