Re: SVG status update

[Patrick McCarty]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 08:55:39AM -0700, Mark Polesky wrote:
> Patrick McCarty wrote:
> > > P.S.: What's all this about text element being rasterized or converted
> > > to paths? I can edit them as regular text elements in Inkscape without
> > > problems.
> > 
> > Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure what Mark was referring
> > to.  Possibly the low graphics quality at 100% zoom in Firefox.
> 
> I've attached 2 PNGs, one at 100% zoom and one at 300%. The graphics
> quality for the musical elements is excellent but the text comes out
> pixellated. Using Firefox 3.0.11 on Windows XP. I guess the text output
> depends on the installed fonts that Firefox sees on my system, but I
> wonder if that's a good idea. I'm thinking that svg output can be used
> for web apps (like wikipedia for instance), and I wouldn't want musical
> examples to suffer from such user dependencies.

I agree that it looks bad.  I'll add a feature request to the wiki.

> Though my understanding of the issues involved is rather limited, so
> I might just be missing the point.

My understanding is a bit limited too.  But I know this task would be
*much* more difficult than extracting glyph paths from a plain-text
SVG font with regular expressions.

The advantage of PostScript is that binary font embedding is allowed.

Maybe we could ship the default text fonts (Century Schoolbook) as SVG
fonts too?  Then this might be possible.  I don't know if there are
any licensing issues though.  I just tried converting the bold face to
an SVG font, and it worked fine.  At least, it would give me
motivation to try converting these too.

But a big downside of converting everything to paths is that the text
can no longer be *edited* directly as text (in Inkscape, for example).
The SVG format is more suitable for editing than PostScript or PDF
are, so more users will be tempted to fire up Inkscape and try editing
the plain text if they find an SVG file.

If we decide to take this route, we should have a command-line switch,
like

  -dsvg-glyphs-to-paths

I'll write all of this down so that it's not forgotten.  Thanks for
bringing up this issue.

Thanks,
Patrick