Natural Reject wrote:I did a bit of digging as I have been thinking about making my own font to personalize my comics further, and I found a pretty decent tutorial at http://cleversomeday.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/inkscape-dings/. There's both a video and pdf version, and I found them both quite easy to follow.

Now I don't know much about font support in browsers and whatnot, but she talks about using an online font converter (linked on the web page) to change the font from svg to ttf. Could this process perhaps solve the problem of svg fonts not being supported by Mozilla?

Certainly it's possible to generate a ttf font from scratch or from an existing SVG font - but unless you can get your readers/viewers/users to install it on their machines, you'll have to deal with making it available as a WOFF webfont and possibly encoding it as a data: url. For most casual uses this quickly starts to become a lot more hassle than it's worth.

The big advantage of SVG fonts is that they are SVG. It may sound obvious, but they're pretty much just the same SVG code as anything else created with Inkscape. This gives them three properties which I consider to be particularly useful:

1) They can be hand edited (as much as any complex SVG file can)
(TTF/WOFF fonts cannot practically be hand edited)
2) They can be dynamically modified by script running in a web page (consider animated characters, or tweening from one font to another)
(TTF/WOFF fonts cannot practically be modified by script - and certainly not using the same sort of code that would be used to modify HTML or SVG)
3) They can be trivially embedded into an SVG document
(TTF/WOFF fonts can be embedded, but only by an additional conversion step to change them into a data: url - a text-encoded version of the binary file)

So depending on your requirements, converting to ttf may be a viable workaround. If you're going down that route anyway then I'd be inclined to just use FontForge (http://www.fontforge.org) to generate the ttf fonts directly.

My particular requirement was to create the text used on this comic: http://www.peppertop.com/greys/2010/07/ ... orian-job/
Because we allow people to download the SVG file, any font used had to be embedded into the file - we didn't want people to have to install a font or have access to the server just to view the image. Learning how to create a ttf file, converting it to WOFF format and embedding it via a data: url was deemed to be too much work when we really just wanted to draw a comic.

The end result is that the text you see there is made up of paths, rather than "text". This makes it much harder to translate, and results in text that isn't actually "text" and therefore can't be picked up by a search engine, or a screen reader. If we could have used SVG fonts then none of these problems would exist. It is worth noting, however, that although Inkscape has an SVG font editor, I don't think it lets you use the resulting font inside Inskcape itself! (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that)

So yes, converting to ttf might do the trick, depending on your requirements. But there's a lot more to it than meets the eye, and you might still face other compatibility issues (Do all browsers support WOFF yet? What about data: urls?). I'm not suggesting you shouldn't try it, but you shouldn't go into it thinking that it's a simple case of running an SVG file through an online converter and you're done.