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

[Patrick]

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. 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.

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


Patrick