Haakon Meland Eriksen wrote:
Unfortunately, there are several technical problems that needs to be addressed, and I haven't had the time to investigate which problems are between the chair and the keyboard, in Inkscape or in Firefox and other browsers. Here are the once I've found so far with some help from a friend:
- Fonts to paths == none-text, thus not indexable or searchable in a
browser, and well ... not fonts. I asked Opera's Håkon Wium Lie the following question over at "A list apart":
I think this is a NO-NO. The text should stay as text and not be converted to path, eventually the search engine will support and index it (and on top of that, converting a lot of text to paths will make the file size huge).
I imagine the following solution: use fonts with the same metrics and a fall-back mechanism, like the following CSS I use for my HTML: font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, sans-serif ;
Liberation Sans is a free font with the same metrics as Arial (it also has a Serif and Monospaced variants) which I expect to be installed by default in a Linux distro (my primary target), and if it is not available, Arial is used (Windows). It may be the other way, with Arial first and Liberation as fallback.
Of course, this will limit your font use to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, but the same is true if you want to tightly control the look on HTML or whatever else where you can't embed the fonts (BTW, you *can* embed fonts in SVG).
- Honouring Z-order.
This is a bug in the browser and should be fixed by the browser.
- 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.
This renders an SVG-only site pretty, but mostly useless in my opinion.
For now, sadly this is true, I agree.