[webkit-dev] Port-specific OpenType support

[Myles C. Maxfield]

Sorry for all the confusion on this. Let me clarify the proposal:

I am not proposing dropping support for SVG fonts. I am proposing transcoding SVG fonts on-the-fly, at page-load time, to OpenType fonts, then delivering the OpenType fonts to the underlying platform (just as if the original page was using a web OTF font in the first place).

100% of this work is platform-agnostic.

Once this converter is in place, it will mean that we can remove all of our custom SVG-font-rendering code in WebCore (because the platform will be responsible for drawing the text instead of WebCore), which would be a very good thing for the many reasons listed earlier.

With this in mind, my original question should make more sense - are there any ports who want support for SVG fonts but whose platforms don’t support OpenType? It sounds like the GTK platform supports OTF, which means they are likely okay with this proposal. mrobinson: is that correct?

Thanks,
Myles

> On Sep 15, 2014, at 10:30 AM, Martin Robinson <mrobinson at webkit.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Tim Horton <thorton at apple.com> wrote:
>> 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:
>>>> 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).
> 
> Sorry. I probably should have been less obscure about this, but this
> was a gentle request that the work be done using cross-platform
> abstractions, so that it can be shared. If that's difficult or
> impossible, we'll figure something else out. :)
> 
> --Martin
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