SVG fonts; SVG Problems
I have created proper card mock-ups of my two Alleged Tarot 2002—adding the title of
the card in a font I have cobbled together for the
occasion. The SVG format allows for the creation of fonts using
SVG primitives, and just this once I have elected to write
a font by entering the numbers by hand, viewing some sample
text, and changing the numbers til it looks right (yes,
I know this is crazy). To do this I an using a text editor
on Jeremy’s NT box, displaying the
SVG in MSIE with Adobe’s plug-in. It works so long as
I include the font definition in the same SVG file; my
attempts to use indirect @font-face definitions (so
the font data can be in one file shared by all the SVG files)
have so far failed. Also, after repeated reloads of slightly
broken SVG files, the plug-in eventually crashes and takes MSIE
with it.
I also discovered a strange anomaly when using the
image element to include one SVG file in another:
it all worked OK while I was viewing SVG in files
(file://... URLs), but when the same images were
installed on my test server, the referenced image vanished!
Worse, after I had tried viewing them from the web server,
the same problem manifested when I viewed the corresponding
files on disc. After closing MSIE and restarting it I was
able to view the files again. The workaround for this problem
is to not use images indirectly, and instead to copy the
referenced SVG direct in to the referring image. At some point
I will make a script for doing this automatically...
I have tried viewing these images with Mozilla 0.9.7 with SVG.
The simple images are partially
displayed, but the viewBox attribute is ignored; as
a result you see only the top-left corner of the image! Also,
the colours are all replaced with shades of blue and magenta.
The fancy versions with the title
displayed in my special font do not display at all.