Hi Robert,
You wrote: data:text/html,<body style%3D"font-size%3A 300px%3B">poo %26%23x1f4a9%3B<%2Fbody> Does that mean that FF will provide path definitions for fonts representing all Unicode, or are emoji viewed as special? When I run the page at http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/SymbolaB1.svg in Firefox, I see that FF currently provides its own examples of many of the emoji (including x1f4a9). Where in the Mozilla archives could I find the path data associated with those glyphs? Some of them are quite nice, and would be, perhaps, better than some of the Symbola characters. For example, the poo character in Symbola is rather "crappy" compared to the Mozilla version. I assume the Mozilla variants are liberally licensed? How about animation in emoji in FF? Some of them literally cry out for animation, polychrome, gradients, etc. I suppose if one is building them into the browser then one doesn't have to worry too much about 2MB of path data, but a "canonical" emoji font would clearly be much smaller. Gradients could help, in an example like "foggy" U+1f301 implemented in Symbola as a graduated halftone and taking 12819 bytes to encode [1] . A gradient with stop-opacity<1 would bring such an effect very easily. The character U+1F53A "up pointing red triangle" in Symbola is represented with a half-tone (lots of dots) and currently takes up 19963 bytes in SVG. An up pointing red triangle in native SVG would take up about 40 bytes. A 500-fold reduction in font size would clearly be advantageous for portable fonts (but this is an extreme example). I'm thinking that the modifications of Symbola that we're considering will assume that most browsers will have better scores on the 4/4 test [2] in the foreseeable future, with IE and FF being the only significant holdouts. At any rate, if we can provide a 200K semanticon font (with emoji as a subset) as SVG, then incentive for expanded implementation across browsers of the spec may be added. Maybe not, but I figure that only about 1/3 of the glyphs used in the world come from font-families - the remainder, on shop signs, adverts and the like are hand drawn. In grad school I worked out a system of about 100 semantic primitives out of which one could express almost all ideas that were not bound to the molecular world: ideas of philosophy, science and abstraction. It was the hamburgers and the typhoons that were hard to express with semantic primitives, but emoji together with some other work on universal symbologies provide insight into how one might make a more comprehensive (and compact) orthography that "works" across cultures. Best regards David [1] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/SymbolaB1.svg [2] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/embedSVGfont1.html From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Longson Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2012 3:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [svg-developers] Re: current level of support for SVG fonts by browser -- preparing for emoji and other semanticons > It would be important for both accessibility and for the implementation of > emoji (in which color is a part of the Unicode definition of many of the > characters). Browsers are implementing emoji without using SVG. Firefox 19 will support colour emoji as will Safari/Chrome on Mac OS 10.7 Here's an example. data:text/html,<body style%3D"font-size%3A 300px%3B">poo %26%23x1f4a9%3B<%2Fbody> You need to be on Mac 10.7 for this as it ships with an emoji font. Best regards Robert. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [email protected] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
