[webkit-dev] Port-specific OpenType support

[Tim Horton]

On 2014.09.14, at 01:11, Dirk Schulze <krit at webkit.org> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 11, 2014, at 11:03 PM, Martin Robinson <mrobinson at webkit.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield at apple.com> wrote:
>>> My question to WebKit-Dev is: Are there any ports who:
>>> 1) Want continued support for SVG fonts, and
>>> 2) Whose platforms do not support OpenType fonts natively?
>> 
>> WebKitGTK+ supports OpenType natively and I as far as I know we have
>> no problems dropping support for SVG fonts. If SVG fonts are supported
>> by the Mac port though, we will probably still want to maintain
>> support for our own port, if possible.
> 
> SVG Fonts live in the non-platform WebCore space. Dropping support for one platform but keeping the code around for another wouldn’t be of any benefit for WebCore as a whole.

Agreed (but I don’t think the original email was suggesting that; pretty sure Myles was just gauging whether there were any ports that don’t have OT support but need SVG fonts, which would preclude switching over to the translation approach).

> Adobe’s TypeKit team dropped support for SVG Fonts a couple of months ago and got very view complains. OT should be supported for WebKitGTK+ from the beginning and is a better replacement for WebCore’s SVG Font implementation in any possible way. It is much less likely that content for WebKitGTK+ uses SVG Fonts than for content for iOS. And even Apple seems to be willing to drop support now.

As mentioned recently, we probably can’t drop support outright, but if Myles’ experiment with translating straightforward (no color/animation/etc.) SVG fonts to OpenType and rendering them that way pans out (which it seems like it’s going to), we can remove a good deal of scary code and do it that way instead (that should cover most-if-not-all of the cases that block us from removing support entirely).

> Greetings,
> Dirk
> 
>> 
>> --Martin
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