Re: SVG instrument names misaligned

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2010-12-25, Mike Solomon wrote:
> This displays fine as a PDF, but as an SVG the names of the staves
> appear oddly shifted in several browsers.  Any suggestions for how
> to fix that w/o too much kludgery?

Are you talking about the inter-word spacing or about text-alignment
issues in certain browsers?

In Chromium, for instance, the line of text "en mordant l'anche" is
not correctly aligned.  Other browsers seem to handle this fine.

The issue of inter-word spacing is a problem with many browsers.  For
example, if you open your SVG in Firefox, then refresh the page,
letters will shift into (generally) incorrect positions.

In terms of a fix, I can't think of one at the SVG level.  LilyPond
uses simple <text> and <tspan> elements to render text, and browsers
should be responsible for making the text look nice at all zoom
levels.

> Also, is there a way in SVG to use a font whose design is more
> appropriate for the scaled size of lilypond's normal output?  I have
> a feeling that part of the reason this may be off is due to the
> crimped nature of the font that comes with using native SVG fonts.

LilyPond 2.12 uses SVG fonts, but LilyPond 2.13 does not.  This was
changed because the support for SVG fonts is not widespread.  Opera,
Batik Squiggle, and Webkit browsers support them, but Firefox probably
never will.

To answer your question though, I'm not aware of any SVG support for
handling fonts with different design sizes (at least not
automatically).

> I would be more than happy if there were an option that created a an
> SVG which turned all of the fonts to which I'm accustomed in the
> postscript version into Bezier paths in the SVG that displayed as
> beautiful lilypond lettering.

So something like on-the-fly glyph conversion?  I opened an issue for
this a while ago:

https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=973

By the way, I'll have a look at your JavaScript/SVG work later this
evening.

Thanks,
Patrick