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:
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:
https://www.svgopen.org/2009/
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)
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