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

[Vadim Plessky]

On Wednesday 20 November 2002 5:07 pm, David Turner wrote:
[...]
|
|  > - Web Fonts
|  >    - Downloadable fonts as part of the CSS2 specification.         -
|  > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#referencing
|  >
[...]
|
|  A _long_ time ago, the W3C organized a "www-fonts" commitee to
|  try to standardize "web fonts". Unfortunately, this never produced
|  anything useful, because each party had its own interests in mind:
|
|     - font designers didn't want fonts to be disseminated easily
|       through the web, even when in compact formats.
|       (today, PDFs and Word documents routinely embed these, and
|        nobody seems to complain much, or engage in vast piracy
|        because of this)
|
|     - font technology vendors (Adobe, BitStream, Agfa, Microsoft)
|       all had their own "solutions" to the problem and didn't want
|       a standard that meant, in essence, the end of their business
|
|  So, nothing came out of this discussion, except vibrant marketing
|  from vendors, and scared warnings from designers. That was probably
|  the least productive W3C project to date (though I've been said
|  that some recent "improvements" aren't that useful too ;-)

I fully agree with David.

|
|  The CSS2 folks then simply decided that anybody could embed any font
|  in any format and call it "standard CSS2". Really great idea !!!
|

Yes, support for web-fonts in CSS2 is a *mess*!

|  Now, what is the chance that *all* CSS2/SVG viewers will support
|  *all* these "standard" formats. 0 of course !! Instead, it's a
|  "let's the market decide" attitude which leads to the current
|  mess.
|
|  This means that the really "standard" formats will be determined
|  over time by what is best supported by the most widely used tools
|  and viewers.

So, I think "standard font format" is font format supported by FreeType.
Should we make this W3C proposal/recommendation? ;-))

|
|  My opinion is that this will be OpenType/CFF, or CEF (Compact Embedded
|  Fonts), a variation of it that Adobe already uses in its SVG Viewer.

I doubt that Adobe has _any_ power nowdays.
(but from developer's pointof view, I agree that we should go forward with PS 
Type1/Type2 hinting models, not with TrueType)

So, wether we like it or not - default font format would be format choosen by 
Microsoft.
Which, I suppose, would be TrueType (2nd order) with OpenType tables.


|  You can really forget about TrueDoc/Speedo/Intellifont, these
|  technologies are going the way of the dodo when it comes to SVG.
|
|  And .eot (Embedded OpenType) is, as far as I know, the proprietary
|  format used by Microsoft to embed fonts in its Office documents,
|  as well as its Web Font Embedding tools. As far as I know, it's
|  basically Agfa's MicroType (i.e. loss-less compression of
|  OpenType/TrueType fonts), and will never be supported by FT2.
|  Just forget about it too :-)
|

Interesting.
Do you have any links on AGFA MicroType or Embedded OpentType?

|  > ...
|  >
|  > 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.
|
|  Well, all I can publicly say is that SVG has a problem because it
|  tries to be too many things at once. I can cite SVG's good points:
|
|     - it's XML-based, and that's very good
|
|     - it has low-level graphics capabilities similar to that of PDF
|       (like Apple's Quartz :-), without some of the stupidity from this
|       format.
|
|     - ideal to specify scalable graphics *images* (not documents)
|
|  Now, come the bad points:
|
|     - much too many ways to perform styling. Reliance on CSS is _not_
|       a good point (now, your SVG viewer needs a complete CSS2 parser,
|       which happens to *not* be trivial to code, despite what every
|       CSS proponents claims here, and I'm not even talking about CSS3)

CSS2 was too bloated and has not very good perception.
CSS 2.1 has some improvements over 2.0 (check some threads on address@hidden 
mailing list.
I am afraid that CSS3, despite being modular, is also too much bloated.

|
|     - text and fonts are second-class citizens in SVG, and this creates
|       some problems when it comes to creating high-quality documents.

I tend to agree with you.

|
|     - tries to be an animation language (like Flash), and a document
|       structure language (like PDF), but falls flat in both cases. In
|       other words, SVG is good for the software industry because it will
|       require incredibly complex tools to produce any industrial-strength
|       animation or document, when more focused and simple alternatives
|       do exist.
|
|     - tries to be a document structure language, when it should really
|       be a document presentation language; inducing incredible problems
|       that can only be managed through the other W3 creations
|       (CSS, JavaScript, namespaces, XLink, etc...)

JavaScript is Netscape creation :-)
But I tend to agree with you for the rest.

|
|  In other words, use SVG to edit scalable images. These SVG icons *are*
|  really cool :-). Avoid it if you want to generate large documents,
|  unless you're ready to waste buckets of money and time mastering some
|  un-needed complexity.

Ah, you are right: SVG icons is key driving force in SVG adoption, at least on 
Linux!..
Making those ones is just like eating peanuts.
I like process itself! ;-) 

|
|  Anyway, I'm pretty certain that none of the available SVG Viewers today
|  support all of the W3 specifications (with the exception of Adobe, Batik
|  and all the TinySVG variants).

And I have heard that it takes Batik around 18sec. to render simple SVG 
drawing (SVG icon) while other renderers do the task in less than 0.5 sec.

|
|  There are ways to make things easier. For example, I know some people
|  that use XSLT to translate documents into _simple_ SVG images on demand,
|  but the machinery behind this is quite impressive. Of course, they also
|  generate PDF documents on the fly :-)
|
|  Hope this helps,

David, would you mind if I post your comments on SVG (and fonts) on www-svg 
mailing list?
I already wrote essay-like message to www-style (why PostScript fonts are 
betetr than TrueType fonts) today, and I think some of your commones are 
quite inetresting and would greatly complement discussion on www-style.

|
|  - David Turner
|  - The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)
|  _______________________________________________
|  Devel mailing list
|  address@hidden
|  http://www.freetype.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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