Any advantage to using SVG font in @font-face instead of TTF/EOT?

Question

I am investigating the usage of SVG fonts in @font-face declaration. So far, only Safari 4 and Opera 10 seem to support it (see an example for test [1]). Firefox 3.5 does not support it but there is a bug report [2] but no fix has been supplied yet (though there are patches). I also came across this discussion[3] which tangentially talks about advantages/disadvantages of SVG fonts.

I am wondering, with @font-face support in major browsers, what is the advantage of using SVG font format in lieu of TTF/OTF/EOT formats? The only advantage I can glean from the discussion linked above was that you can add your own missing gylphs to fonts that do not support them yet.

Is there any other reason to specify SVG fonts in CSS?

[1], [2], [3] links respectively in http://linkbun.ch/e3mc

Answer 1

The W3C states these advantages:

One disadvantage to the WebFont facility to date is that specifications such as [CSS2] do not require support of particular font formats. The result is that different implementations support different Web font formats, thereby making it difficult for Web site creators to post a single Web site using WebFonts that work across all user agents.

To provide a common font format for SVG that is guaranteed to be supported by all conforming SVG viewers, SVG provides a facility to define fonts in SVG. This facility is called SVG fonts.

SVG fonts can improve the semantic richness of graphics that represent text. For example, many company logos consist of the company name drawn artistically. In some cases, accessibility may be enhanced by expressing the logo as a series of glyphs in an SVG font and then rendering the logo as a 'text' element which references this font.

But the point of a common format doesn't really count because of the lacking browser support.

Answer 2

It seems to be the only way to use web fonts on Mobile Safari. So that's a pretty big advantage if you're developing for iPhones and iPads. Font Squirrel's @font-face generator can create the appropriate SVG file and CSS syntax from any OpenType font.

Answer 3

svg webfonts cannot work within an offline webapp. You can see an example here: http://straathof.acadnet.ca/beta2.2 Save this file to an idevice homepage, turn on airplane mode and open it. The svg fonts and the naming system used cause the font url to fail.

hopefully Apple fixes that soon.