Reinventing Fire

Several times recently, people have asked on IRC how they can use nice fonts with SVG. My answer in the long-ago past, when Adobe’s excellent SVG Viewer plugin roamed the Earth, was to use SVG Fonts directly embedded in the SVG file… but that’s no longer practical with the current varied browser support.

By far the easiest way to do this today is to use webfonts, such as WOFF.

Authoring tools, like Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator, should simply manage this for authors, but until that happens, I thought I’d share a relatively simple workflow that has helped others. (Warning: I will use the words font and typeface with careless abandon to semantics in this article, though I know the difference. I’m afraid the more sensitive souls among you may suffer apoplectic righteous indignation.)

I will walk you through this workflow step-by-step, but if you get lost, just look at the source code… it’s pretty self-explanatory.

1. Find a font you like. For this example, I chose Riesling, an Art Deco typeface by “Bright Ideas”. I made sure the font was free and didn’t have any restrictions for online or commercial use.
2. Upload the font to FontSquirrel’s @font-face generator, and download the resulting package. This contains the webfonts, as well as some sample files (though not an example of how to use the files in SVG).
3. Copy the resulting webfont files (*.eot, *.ttf, *.woff, *.svg) into the same directory as the SVG file that will reference them. (Note: do not confuse the SVG file in the FontSquirrel package for a content file; it is an SVG font, with no rendering content.)
4. Copy the CSS @font-face style rule from the FontSquirrel package file (“stylesheet.css”), and put it in your SVG’s <style> element.
5. Optionally, for local testing, install the original TTF file as a system font, and add the local value to the @font-face style rule
6. Add a style rule for text elements, using the resulting font-family. In my example, I also created a style rule for textPath elements.
7. No, really, that’s it. You’re done.

Here is the resulting SVG using webfonts:

A Word on the Future of SVG Fonts

Since I’ve mentioned SVG Fonts a couple of times, I thought I’d leave you with a final note about what the future seems to hold for them.

SVG Fonts were added in SVG 1.0, way back in 1999, as a way to embed fonts in the same file, using vectors and all the capabilities of SVG, including separate fill and stroke (which could be gradients or other paint sources), and even exotic features like clip-paths, animation, and so on; Jérémie Patonnier has a great article on the topic. As cool as this is, it doesn’t necessarily work well with existing font engines… The Adobe SVG Viewer had support for SVG Fonts, and Opera and WebKit added support for the less-powerful SVG Tiny 1.2 subset as well; but Mozilla and Microsoft decided not to add support for SVG Fonts, and that limits their usefulness. It doesn’t seem likely that SVG2 (being developed now) will include SVG Fonts, not necessarily even the more limited subset (though there is not yet consensus in the SVG Working Group).

In practical usage, SVG Fonts were once the only way to use webfonts on iOS devices (e.g. the iPhone and iPad), which is why FontSquirrel includes them in their font-face package; but this is no longer the case, and iOS 4.2 added support for TTF fonts, which reportedly perform better. I expect this use of SVG Fonts to dwindle away… people will naturally want to use as few font formats as possible.

But for all of you out there who, like me, love the cool things you can do with SVG Fonts that aren’t possible in traditional outline font formats, don’t despair! Even as I write this, a proposal is being prepared by the SVG glyphs for OpenType Community Group to add a subset of SVG to OpenType, for more interesting typeface capabilities.

SVG Fonts are dead! Long live SVG Fonts!

There has been a heated argument recently on the W3C Canvas API mailing list between accessibility advocates and browser vendors over a pretty tricky topic: should the Canvas API have graphical “objects” to make it more accessible, or should authors use SVG for that? I think it’s a false dichotomy, and I offer a proposal to suggests a way to improve the accessibility potential of the Canvas 2D API by defining how SVG and the Canvas 2D API can be used together.

This brings together some ideas I’ve had for a while, but with some new aspects. This is still a rough overview, but the technical details don’t seem too daunting to me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Text in SVG is text. Visually, you can use webfonts like WOFF or SVG Fonts (where they are supported, like in Opera or the iPhone) to make it look cool, and you can style both the stroke and fill to make it all fancy, or apply filters to pop it out or make it glow or give it a dropshadow, but it’s not just a raster image like many text headers… it’s human- and machine-readable text, as nature intended.

So, SVG is translatable, right?
Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla is holding an Open Web Games competition. I expect that many of the games will be use the Canvas API, since many programmers are more familiar with the imperative programming mode, and there are some games libraries that have been developed for Canvas or adapted from existing drawing or gaming libraries.

But I’m calling for SVG developers and designers to step up to the plate, as well. SVG has a lot of features that make it easier out of the box to build interfaces, animations, and even games. There is a scene graph, and the DOM event model that gives you free hit detection for pointer events, for example. And I’d love to see someone make an open-web game that’s both accessible and fun…

To help developers along, I thought I’d share a few free, open-source SVG resources that could be useful in building games:
Read the rest of this entry »

With SVG being integrated more and more into HTML5, both included via <object> and <img> elements, and inline in the same document, some natural questions about SVG and CSS are receiving more focus. This includes box model questions like background and border, and pointer events.

I’m interested in comments from the community on what direction SVG should take.

Read the rest of this entry »

Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory”, reminding us that we shouldn’t confuse our mental models for reality. But maps, and data visualizations of all kinds, are really powerful, conveying complex ideas easily, and even shaping (or misshaping) perceptions about facts. This is one reason why decentralization of mapping resources and services is good; no one organization should control our common maps.

SVG is a natural fit for mapping. There’s even a detailed proposal by KDDI’s Satoru Takagi-sensei for tiling, layering, and coordinate resolution that fits on top of SVG, which I’d like to see standardized.

I’ve had an idea for a small open-source project for a while, which I’ve discussed with the brilliant Andreas Neumann of Carto.net; he’s been too busy planning SVG Open every year to help out with it thus far, and I don’t have the skills to do it without a great investment in time.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing a lot of website stuff this week. Here’s some highlights:
Read the rest of this entry »

SVG paths have a pretty good set of shape commands, enough to let you draw any 2D shape you might want in an authoring tool: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal straight lines, elliptical arc segments, and cubic and quadratic Bézier curves. Béziers are great, giving you precise control over the position and curve interpolation of each point in a concise format, using control points (“handles”), and are easily chained together to create complex shapes.

But let’s say you have a series of points, and you want to draw a smooth line between them, e.g. for stock data, an audio wave, or a mathematical graphing equation. Béziers are not as handy there, because not all the points needed to define a Bézier spline are on the curve itself. Obviously, you can decompose any set of points into a set of Béziers, but that takes math, and who wants to do that? (Put your hand down, nerd. I’m talking to the normals.)

Sometimes, you just want to lay down a set of points, and let the browser draw a smooth curve (unlike polylines, where each segment is just a straight line between the points). Like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, a browser implementer asked me for examples of SVG. He was having trouble finding good examples of SVG in use, particularly as parts of an HTML document. This question has come up again and again, actually, and it always vexes me. I’ve been active in the SVG community for close to a decade, and I’ve seen thousands of amazing SVG files (and many more of mediocre to average quality), but somehow they seem to have disappeared or bitrotted over the years. Some of those files only worked with the slightly-unstandard Adobe SVG Viewer, or didn’t quite work with Firefox’s incomplete support, I know, but surely not all of them. Where is all the great SVG content I remember, the games and GUIs and design and development? Where are all those files to be found?

I hear some browser implementers say that people just don’t use SVG. Intuitively, this feels false to me, based on my own experience. But could it be true?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m really excited about W3C’s new public Audio Incubator Group, just launched today, and open for collaborators, innovators, and instigators. Go take a look for yourself, and see if you can contribute.

To celebrate the occasion, here’s a simple example of an experimental audio inteface, in the world’s first (and worst) audio synthesizer in SVG (you’ll need a special Minefield build to use it). Just click on the keyboard… it’s pretty rough still, but it shows some of the potential:

(standalone SVG file)

For some background, read on after this break…
Read the rest of this entry »