Comment 5 for bug 170963

marked 17224 as a dupe of this one. At that bug, Juca pasted in a relevant transcript from the IRC channel:

Juca: svg fonts are definitelly an apealing feature to me. They seem to be very very useful for drawing semantics
[JonCruz] yes. they could be very handy
Juca: do you understand how pango works?
[JonCruz] I've done text stuff, but pre-pangofication
Juca: i was reading the svg fonts spec and then tryied to figure out how could it be implemented.
Juca: I see that the <font> tag declares a new family that is later referenced by text
Juca: so, I imagine that there must be a way of injecting arbitrary svg into pango's glyph slots and then instantiate a font and register it, so that it gewts recognized by a family name
Juca: but I have never dealt with pango
Juca: so I have no idea how do do it
[JonCruz] well... I'm thinking that we might need to inject curves, etc. and not SVG directly.
Juca: yeah, but it seems that the spec says the glyphs should be made of arbitrary svg
Juca: and I think pango may not be capable of dealing with everything that can be generated by an svg renderer
Juca: for example, can a glyph use an svg filter?
Juca: I think that it can. But how would pango deal with it?
[JonCruz] good question
Juca: maybe these aspects would make it necessary to build a parallel infrastucture for <font> tag