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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] [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)