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[Robin Berjon]
> Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> > I was very happy I could use SVG and liked it much better than working
with
> > Postscript - although PS can do a lot more or at least it is easier to
> > figure out how
>
> I'd be interested in knowing what PS can do that SVG can't and that you'd
have
> liked to see in SVG while working on those tasks.
>
It has been nearly ten years since I worked with Postscript, so my memory is
hazy. Aside from font metrics, it seems to me that it was easier for me to
scale a drawing without scaling the font size. I found that to be a problem
for me with SVG. I suppose I did not work hard enough to get a balance
between defining bits and pieces with separate transforms, vs fewer
transforms applying on a larger scale. But as I remember it, I rarely had
trouble understanding to move things around and scale them with PS, yet
still label them with a font whose size I chose (and which stayed unscaled).
Also, because PS is a pretty capable programming language, it was easy to
compute things on the fly when I needed to. You understand, I am comparing
my PS experiences with generating SVG without a language binding (e.g.,
using a stand-alone stylesheet). From my point of view, the PS program was
a sort of equivalent to the results of a transformaton that produces svg,
because in both cases, I would feed the result to the renderer and get some
image displayed.
> > But SVG is missing one capability that really gets in the
> > way of using it in complex applications, so far as I am concerned. That
is
> > the lack of font metrics. You cannot find out how big any piece of text
is,
> > so you cannot programatically line many things up, you cannot properly
break
> > lines, etc. I hope that the SVG language experts have or will figure
out a
> > way to deal with that, because I think it is essential.
>
> Can you tell me what you found missing from the SVGTextContentElement[0]
> interface? getComputedTextLength() could be of some help, and you should
be able
> to call getBBox() on a <text> element.
>
I cannot call any of those methods when transforming xml into svg with an
ordinary stylesheet, AFAICT, since I have do DOM available to work with. Is
that not right? But they ought to be very useful where there is a language
binding available.
Cheers,
Tom P
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