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Comment by gibsonf1 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'd love to use this to generate dynamic graphs with text - but does it support text?

Canvas itself does not support text; there are various hacks to, e.g., port PS fonts to canvas, but it's a really ugly scene. Other methods include overlaying HTML text via CSS and server-side image rendering fonts. It's all really ugly.

Firefox 3 supports native text rendering. There's a couple demos that show this (although you're out in the cold in other browsers, for now at least).

Yup it does, and it's been recently added to the spec (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#text). Unfortunately, the font rendering as currently in the spec won't return the path of the font, which is a feature that allows nodebox to do some really neat things (eg http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/LetterKnitter).

Is there any word on whether other browsers will be implementing this in the future? It's what's keeping me from using canvas today, and partially what's keeping me from writing a certain app I've been thinking about for a little while.

partially what's keeping me from writing a certain app I've been thinking about for a little while

Have you played with SVG?

In my experience it's painfully slow and advanced features are spottily supported on every implementation I've tried; is yours different?

I've tested some of my SVG demos with FF 3 and they run much faster than with FF 2 (I think that's due to Cairo being integrated into Firefox 3). Opera and Safari are very fast compared to FF 2, too.

As for feature completeness I agree with you. The Firefox SVG team is very small and not funded by the Mozilla corporation (at least that was the case last year when I talked to one of its members) - the SVG standard, on the other hand, is HUGE.

I'm using it for a simple web app, testing in FF2/FF3/Safari, seems to work fine... there are some annoying bugs in the implementation (the kind that have been open for years), and inconsistencies between Safari and FF, but nothing I couldn't work around so far.

What were your issues?

We started by using graphviz to generate svg, but then couldn't find any decent in-line svg viewers. Do you know of any non-java applet inline svg viewers?

Not yet, I've looked at it a bit but haven't looked in to browser compatability at all.

Processing.js now supports Ture Type Fonts: http://processingjs.org/source/ttf-pfonts/ttf-pfont-pjs.html

I mean TrueType fonts of course :P

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