Text in SVG?

[travisgriggs]

I want to generate some SVG info graphics/charts from Elixir. I got pretty excited about this when I found it. It's been a while, but back in the day, I did bindings for VisualWorks Smalltalk and really enjoyed Cairo. When generating SVG, I ran into a couple of problems, it seams that Text is actually not generating Text nodes in SVG? But instead is adding shape glyphs for letters. I think this is a side effect of Cairo itself? Is it possible to transcend this at all? Or is it just that text sucks with Cairo/SVG?

I found that Xairo.Text.extents() does not work with an SVGImage, I'm not sure entirely why that is. I seem to recall that text_extents() at the C level just takes a CR and returns the values.

[mikowitz]

Sorry for the delayed response! I haven't had much time to focus on this project recently.

I don't have an answer I'm 100% sure of, but I believe this might be related to Cairo's concept of a "toy" font vs a glyph-based approach to text display. This library currently implements a binding for cairo_show_text which according to the docs here uses the "toy" font, as opposed to cairo_show_glyphs which is the "real" text display API.

The issues with Xairo.Text.extents() not working for an SVGImage is an overly restrictive function signature on my part. I've fixed it as the first part of expanding the general text API in this pull request: mikowitz/xairo#44

That API is on my list of features to implement pre-1.0, and I'm hoping this summer to have more time to devote to getting this project back on its feet!

[mikowitz]

@travisgriggs I may have spoken too soon. I just tried a very basic test with SVGImage and text and it displayed just fine, as far as I can tell. If you have an Elixir file that demonstrates it not working properly, feel free to upload it here and I can take a look!