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Today I read-or-skimmed J. David Eisenberg's "SVG Essentials", an ORA book I was given last year. It's pretty good. Doing so let me discover how to embed fonts inside SVG documents, and that let me make this improved deck, which should work if you have Zapf Dingbats installed on your system. It's still not perfect, but (at least in my Mac's Web browser) it looks how I meant it to look, the first time around. I'm curious how it looks in Windows.

(How did I embed those fonts? On the book's advice, I used the Batik project's ttf2svg program to yank the chessmen and smiley graphics out of my computer's "Apple Symbols" font and into an SVG-style font definition, and then just pasted this into the deck document's <defs> element. The embedded fonts actually include graphics for all those suit symbols, but I think the Zapf ones look better. If I ever actually use this deck for something, I'll embed those symbols instead.)

I really want to play with a vector image editor now. Writing Perl scripts to draw pictures is fun, aye, but the medium's rather lacking in opportunity for spontaneity. (And Sodipodi wouldn't compile on my Mac.) Guess I'll see if there are any Illustrator disks floating around at work.

(Update... OK, apparently if you don't have Zapf Dingbats, you don't see any suit symbols, which is kinda whack, and it seems that a generic Windows box does indeed lack this font. So now the cards use the embedded Apple Symbols glyphs I stole, and therefore should work anywhere.)