[smufl-discuss] Re: Glyph Registration and Graphical Metadata

[dspreadbury]

Joe wrote:

> > Can you provide a good link for documentation of these APIs, for those
of
> > us (i.e. me) who is not super-experienced in using them?
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090825/the-canvas-element.html

<goes away and reads a whole lot of specification documents>

So SVG basically provides no support for anything beyond CSS2, so no
stylistic alternates, and not even automatic support for ligatures, though
it is possible to use ligatures via the altGlyph element. This also means,
I think, that it would be possible for an application whose implementation
is limited to the extent of the SVG API to access stylistic alternates
provided they are given explicit codepoints. Please correct me if I'm
wrong.

Canvas appears to be even more basic than that, though what is not clear
from the specification is whether or not text in Canvas elements is
subject to the same text shaping etc. that text elsewhere in HTML is
subject to. I don't know enough about how Canvas interacts with CSS to
know whether, for example, you can use CSS3 features with text in Canvas
elements. Do you know whether or not that is the case?

It appears that neither SVG nor Canvas provides a simple way to measure a
glyph and get its height, though Canvas does provide a way of getting the
width of text, at least. I imagine I must be missing something here, since
knowing the actual bounding box of a glyph (rather than, say, the size of
the em square) seems pretty fundamental to allowing anything other than
the most basic layout of text and symbols.

Daniel

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