[x3d-public] draft X3D 4.1 prose for font files and libraries

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Andreas Plesch wrote:
> https://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF2/ is a compressed version of WOFF which seems popular on the web due to smaller file sizes. For example, it is used by the Google free Font service. I do not know if there are js/pascal/c etc. loading libraries for woff2 but it should at least be recommended.

CGE (Pascal) just uses FreeType for font reading, so we should support
everything that FreeType handles :) And it does support WOFF 2
according to https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeType-2.10.2-Released .

>
> From what I can tell WOFF and WOFF2 do not need to include font family name information inside the file. So I think that means if such a file is provided it will take precedence over the family field. Holger's overloading suggestion implicitly did this.
>
> A web browser will synthesize bold and italic versions from a normal font version. Should this become a requirement for x3d as well ? Probably not. If authors want to use a bold version for certain, they need to provide corresponding font files.

I see Andres comments align nicely with mine, posted 5 mins ago :)

I also don't think X3D browsers should have the requirement to
synthesize bold and italic versions from a normal font version. If
FreeType doesn't do this (and I don't think it can) then it's not
something I would ever implement, frankly. I'm not even sure how good
are WWW browsers at doing this "synthesizing". The recommendation for
using fonts, that I always seen followed, is that you need 4 font
files (regular, bold, italic, bold+italic) if you want to provide all
the options. The font authors seems to generally agree -- most fonts
come with 4 such files.

And as Andreas said, the spec should say that "url" overrides "family".

Regards,
Michalis