Hi all --
I'm putting together a talk proposal for SVG Open 2009, which will be in early October at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA:
I've got plenty of background I can pull in on the challenges and benefits of SVG on the web and the tradeoffs we've made in our usage and implementation, but I know lots of you folks out there have been more active on the 'content-generation' end of things and can point out some things I wouldn't think of.
If anybody's got any particularly interesting issues, examples, problems, or idea prototypes relating to usage of SVG on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, I'd love to see how much I can pack in. :)
Pointers to cool feature proposals like Nikola's localization presentation at Wikimania last year, or bulk anaylsis like benchmarks and compatibility tests on images in actual use would be of particular interest.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
My personal pet peeve is that RSVG does not support the font embedding part of the SVG specification. So we are limited to either using fonts immediately available on the Mediawiki servers or downconverting all text to shape outlines. The former can lead to unpredictable renderings, while the later makes the text in SVG files more difficult to edit.
I realize that font embedding may have some intellectual property concerns, though I have to imagine that similar concerns still exist when a font is converted to shape outlines which seems to be the current recommended practice. After all, font embedding is really just an indirect way of specifying character shapes.
In addition to the lack of embedded font support, Adobe, RSVG, and Inkscape all seem to have different quirks regarding text alignments, positioning, and path following. So even if one is using an available font, one still may end up downconverting the text in order to get a consistent rendering.
-Robert Rohde
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all --
I'm putting together a talk proposal for SVG Open 2009, which will be in early October at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA:
I've got plenty of background I can pull in on the challenges and benefits of SVG on the web and the tradeoffs we've made in our usage and implementation, but I know lots of you folks out there have been more active on the 'content-generation' end of things and can point out some things I wouldn't think of.
If anybody's got any particularly interesting issues, examples, problems, or idea prototypes relating to usage of SVG on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, I'd love to see how much I can pack in. :)
Pointers to cool feature proposals like Nikola's localization presentation at Wikimania last year, or bulk anaylsis like benchmarks and compatibility tests on images in actual use would be of particular interest.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
El 5/14/09 4:02 PM, Robert Rohde escribió:
My personal pet peeve is that RSVG does not support the font embedding part of the SVG specification. So we are limited to either using fonts immediately available on the Mediawiki servers or downconverting all text to shape outlines. The former can lead to unpredictable renderings, while the later makes the text in SVG files more difficult to edit.
I realize that font embedding may have some intellectual property concerns, though I have to imagine that similar concerns still exist when a font is converted to shape outlines which seems to be the current recommended practice. After all, font embedding is really just an indirect way of specifying character shapes.
Wow, that's a new one to me... hadn't even realized there was a font embedding feature available. :) Definitely going on the list of issues that need overcoming, thanks!
In addition to the lack of embedded font support, Adobe, RSVG, and Inkscape all seem to have different quirks regarding text alignments, positioning, and path following. So even if one is using an available font, one still may end up downconverting the text in order to get a consistent rendering.
Bluh... :(
-- brion
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
I realize that font embedding may have some intellectual property concerns, though I have to imagine that similar concerns still exist when a font is converted to shape outlines which seems to be the
[snip]
Typefaces themselves are generally uncopyrightable under US law. The more major copyright issues come into play with respect to the bytecode included in many truetype fonts. So the issue isn't actually equivalent.
(Not that I advocate converting to outlines— it ruins editability)