(no subject)

[prog]

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.)

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

No... looks like either you don't have the Zapf Dingbats font, or I didn't invoke it correctly. But I think I did (coz it worked on my Mac) and I suspect that ZD isn't a standard Windows font.

Hmmf. Still digging.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Looks fine to me, using Opera on Windows 2000 with the Adobe SVG plugin.

Nice userpic, by the way!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Cool. I bet you loaded it after I gave up on the ol' Dingbats.

I had the Zendo userpic until the Iraq invasion, when I felt compelled to replace its slot with Mr. Pickens here. But when I recently discovered that the default userpic ration had increased, I mixed it back in.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I guess I've been a bit out of it because this is the first time I've ever heard of SVG's before. I went and got myself the SVG plug in and it appears to be working now. Out of curiosity sake I took the font_cards2.svg file and opened it with a text editor to see what the code looks like -- hrm... not something you'd want to code by hand.