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Comment by lazyjeff | Hacker News Reader

Some of what looks challenging here is handling fonts. SVG would be so much better if there was a way to do font embedding. Even a minimal set of fonts would be amazing. Or if operating systems or libraries for SVG support could all commit to supporting a common set of fonts, like browsers did for web safe fonts. Think of how clunky the web would have been without those.

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You can embed fonts in SVG:

https://oreillymedia.github.io/Using_SVG/extras/ch07-dataURI....

In my experience, embedded fonts are handled very inconsistently (and often poorly) by different rendering engines.

In particular: if you load an SVG in Chrome via an img tag, the webfont is not run because the environment tries to execute as little as possible. It'll instead use whatever fallback font is present on the system.

Source: I just dealt with this problem a few weeks ago. I also spent all last week implementing a custom OG image in Canvas. Wish Satori had come out a week earlier!

That didn't sound right to me, and I've just checked that the fonts are loading for me. I wonder if you were embedding them in a way that didn't work?

EDIT: here's how I'm doing the embedding

    <style type="text/css">
        @font-face { font-family:FontName; src:url(data:font/otf;base64,T1RUTwAOAIAAAwBgQ0ZGIHKc...AAAAAAAAAAAA=) format("opentype"); }
    </style>

I've passed by the Chrome SVG code a bit, and I've never seen anything to suggest there's an "SVG lite" type version in there. I imagine it's just painted to a bitmap and handed to the compositor like everything else (obviously a massive simplification).

I think you can safely embed data URLs because they’re known to be static. What you can’t generally do is trigger a network waterfall or dynamic evaluation from an img tag’s SVG resource.

Gotcha. When thinking of embedded fonts, my mind goes straight to totally embedded with data-uris (which would have worked around OPs issue above).

PDF has a set of 14 standard fonts that are expected to be available (or an equivalent font) for consistent rendering across platforms.

Of course they support embedding too, so you can use any font (and I think embedding is required to be conformant with Pdf-a - but I’m a little hazy on that).

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