FreeType 2.12 Released With Support For OT-SVG Fonts

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeType 2.12 Released With Support For OT-SVG Fonts

FreeType as the widely-used, open-source library for font rendering is out with FreeType 2.12 as its first big feature release since last summer...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeType-2.12-Released

[carewolf]

Neat, you can apparently register an external SVG engine, so not necessarily tied to FreeTypes default choice of librsvg.

Though it also means it doesn't work out of the box, and leads to some weird circular dependencies, since SVG libraries are rather big leaf libraries, while text rendering are rather core libraries. You don't want text rendering to always load the big SVG libraries.

[phoron]

Sorry, if I know nothing about this. I can guess carewolf must be about right about this move complicating dependencies (hopefully the new dependency is optional). But what is the use case ? What can one do with SVG that one can't do with Open Type and is it useful and relevant to rendering text ?

[mb_q]

Emojis with sophisticated gradients, shadows and stuff. The alternative is to turn OpenType into a fully-blown vector image format, in light of which this is pretty compelling.

Sorry, if I know nothing about this. I can guess carewolf must be about right about this move complicating dependencies (hopefully the new dependency is optional). But what is the use case ? What can one do with SVG that one can't do with Open Type and is it useful and relevant to rendering text ?

[phoron]

Emojis with sophisticated gradients, shadows and stuff. The alternative is to turn OpenType into a fully-blown vector image format, in light of which this is pretty compelling.

Ok. I didn't think of emojis. Maybe I'm not convinced they belong to a font or character set. At least so sophisticated. I mean text is something that should work in any support, if it requires gradients and so on, then the point might be lost when printed, for instance, or read in e-ink screen, or whatever...

But yes, it's an use case. People like to send ephemeral messages around only meant to be displayed on colorful bright small screens. And I guess it's better to standarize that, although I can more easily think of criteria to standarize characters than emojis, the arbitrariety with emojis seems to give me more fear of centralization... Never mind. Emojis is the use case. Question answered. Thank you.

[carewolf]

Emojis with sophisticated gradients, shadows and stuff. The alternative is to turn OpenType into a fully-blown vector image format, in light of which this is pretty compelling.

Well, fonts are already a vector image format. They are just a monochrome vector image format, but yeah, adding color would require a somebody add a lot of extra features and standardizing it, and you might as well agree on a subset of SVG. Which is what OT-SVG is. Though many implementations use a full featured SVG parser, so likely fonts will be created using stuff the standard says is "optional" and "should be avoided".

I am not expert on librsvg, but as far as I can tell the freetype implementation is not even stripping out SVG elements that MUST be ignored according to the standard (such as <text>).