[cairo] Text output in SVG target

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On Jan 7, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
>
> It should eventually be possible.
>
> SVG fonts aren't widely-supported by the more popular renderers. Nor
> are embedded CSS fonts.
>
> The best solution for getting reasonably accurate, portable output
> that looks the same across viewers and regardless of what fonts are
> installed is to embed the glyph as a series of paths. Of course, this
> comes at the expense of the file's size and human-readability.

That said, does SVG support specifying explicit glyph IDs?  I'd guess  
not, though I think that once we have a good API for pdf text  
embedding, it should be possible to specify a flag on a pdf surface to  
never embed font paths and assume that the fonts exist on the  
destination -- then show_glyphs could use the text info and just  
create a <text> node.  It may not be exactly correct, but it may well  
be exactly what a lot of people want, especially if they can control  
which fonts are present.

     - Vlad