Re: [Devel] SVG & Fonts [was FreeType gzip support completed]

[Vadim Plessky]

On Tuesday 12 November 2002 12:55 am, Patrick wrote:
|  Recently I've become very interested in typography and 2d graphic
|  design. As a result I've been doing a fair amount of research on the
|  Internet trying to collect information on anything related to
|  typography. I'm beginning to document font formats, companies and the
|  history of digital typography right now and I'm surprised that there are
|  so many different formats around. I'm curious to know the rationale
|  behind them all. 

Rationale behind this is very simple: Money. 
Every vendor tries to tweak fonts/implement "extansions", to lock new and 
existing users into own products.

| Many of the formats seem to be for political reasons
|  (ie. market standardization by one company's format over another's)
|  rather than technical ones but its hard to tell since I've only read a
|  few brief pages on each format.

Your statement is pretty much correct.
Adobe opened PS Type1 specification in 1990 (or 1991?) as they realized threat 
from Microsoft-Apple alliance.
Than MS added support for PS Type1 into Windows 2000/Window XP, as they wanted 
Graphic Artists as Windows users.

|
|  Regarding this statement by David Turner:
|  http://www.freetype.org/pipermail/devel/2002-November/004146.html
|  ---
|  "As far as I know, the SVG specification doesn't specify a specific font
|  format, even if it is possible to define "glyph" elements, which are
|  arbitrary 2D shapes that can be used to display text in documents. These
|  are however extremely big to define (SVG paths encoded in text), and do
|  not include any hints or more sophisticated information."
|  ---
|
|  For clarification, with regards to the above post, when using SVG you
|  can specify a font by:
|  - Describing a font
|       - ie. specify family, size, style, etc. as per CSS2 spec
|       - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#font-properties
|       - so this could match any font that your system already has
|       in any format it can handle
|  - SVG Font
|       - ie. path/svg shape descriptions of the glyphs of a font
|       - http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/fonts.html#SVGFonts
|  - Web Fonts
|       - Downloadable fonts as part of the CSS2 specification.         -
|  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#referencing
|
|  With regards to the web fonts the CSS2 spec specifies:
|  String                       Font Format                     Extension 
"truedoc-pfr"         TrueDoc™ Portable Font
|  Resource     .pfr
|  "embedded-opentype"  Embedded OpenType               .eot
|  "type-1"             PostScript™ Type 1              .pfb, .pfa
|  "truetype"           TrueType                        .ttf
|  "opentype"           OpenType, inc. TrueType Open    .ttf
|  "truetype-gx"                TrueType with GX extensions
|  "speedo"             Speedo
|  "intellifont"                Intellifont
|
|  and instructs user agents to ignore unrecognized types. From the
|  freetype homepage the list of supported formats is as follows:
|
|      * TrueType fonts (and collections)
|      * Type 1 fonts
|      * CID-keyed Type 1 fonts
|      * CFF fonts
|      * OpenType fonts (both TrueType and CFF variants)
|      * SFNT-based bitmap fonts
|      * X11 PCF fonts
|      * Windows FNT fonts
|      * BDF fonts (including anti-aliased ones)
|      * PFR fonts
|      * Type42 fonts (limited support)
|
|  Between these two lists I was not sure whether or not Freetype supported
|  embedded OpenType, TrueType w/ GX extensions, Speedo or Intellifonts. My

I think Speedo is supported. TT GX - not.

OpenType is supported partially.
I have tested Latin and Cyrillic fonts in OpenType/Adobe CFF format with 
Freetype 2.1.3, it works fine.
problems start if you want to print something on printer using such font.
KDE3/Qt3 doesn't support embedding for OpenType fonts.
I think GTK2/GNOME2 has similiar problem, but I am not sure 100% here.


|  research indicates that none of them are supported. Is that correct?
|  Speedo and Intellifonts both appear to be defunct and never widely
|  accepted. Embedded OpenType seems to be in competition with TrueDoc but
|  both seem to be unused. NS6 seems to have dropped TrueDoc support and
|  Mozilla doesn't seem to support it either based on tests at truedoc.com;
|  however, Freetype lists support for it. Does anybody use downloadable
|  fonts on web pages? 

I haven't seen such pages.

| Does anybody know of a free tool to create TrueDoc
|  fonts? Since it seems unlikely that people would make complete font

As TrueDoc is not open, open-source tools do not support it.

|  formats available for download in order to display their website, if
|  embedded opentype and truedoc are both unused, that pretty much
|  eliminates the downloadable portion of web fonts for practical use.
|  Also, is TrueType GX effectively dead? Or does Apple support TrueType GX
|  and OpenType?
|
|  ...
|
|  Another comment made in the post I originally referred to was:
|  ---
|  "It may be possible that things changed a lot since 2001 regarding SVG,
|  but I doubt about it. I also don't think that SVG has such a bright
|  future, but that's a different story :-)"
|  ---
|
|  David, can you tell that "different story"? I would be interested in
|  hearing your thoughts on SVG's problems.

Me too.

|
|  Patrick
|  _______________________________________________
|  Devel mailing list
|  address@hidden
|  http://www.freetype.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

-- 

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net
My KDE page
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/