Posted by caminanteblanco 9/14/2025
I realize it's far from a best practice and even explicitly stated as a bad idea somewhere in the SVG spec, but the idea of a document editor where you can individually position each and every character and make detailed, individual glyphs natively without loading fonts is interesting to me.
Are there any examples of this? Or perhaps different (better) approaches to a document editor with the advantages I said above?
• Caret mode (F7) doesn’t work at all.
• Triple click selects all the text on the page, rather than just that of a single <text> element as I’d have expected (in which model you’d use <text> for a paragraph and <tspan> for its lines, and thus get the normal triple-click behaviour).
• Click and drag on a text link starts selection or drags the already-selected text, rather than dragging the link so you can drop it in a new tab or such. And if you mouse up on the same link (regardless of having left it), it activates.
• If you start a selection, it is only updated while you’re moving over text. Drag past the end of the line, then down, and it should select more text, but it only actually will when you move back over text.
• If text is selected, clicking outside text doesn’t clear the selection. (Probably the same root cause.)
• Shift+Up and Shift+Down select to the start or end of the containing <text> element, rather than operating linewise. (Because there’s no such thing logically, it’d require heuristic work. Or for people to implement flowed text, like Inkscape did but sadly then it was pulled out of the spec for some reason.)
There are also a couple of issues specific to this document:
• Document order is not sensible. For example, it goes title, then side nav title, then footer, then body text, then “Home”, then side nav contents, then magic keyword. But this does show a broader problem: in HTML it’s not the easiest to get stupid document ordering (possible, but you have to go a little out of your way), but in SVG it will happen unless you’re careful.
• Also likely to happen unless you’re careful: multiline text sometimes lacks the trailing spaces necessary to separate words once the line break is ignored (since there’s no such thing as a line break in SVG 1.1, only a shifted cursor position). For example, “Inkscapefor” fails, whereas “willing to” succeeds.
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Chromium is interesting. Supports caret browsing (+), Up/Down do something weird (−), triple click only selects that <text> element (+), you can’t start a text selection in a link (±), but you can’t drag the link either (=), and while selecting, any time the pointer is not over text, it’ll shift that selection boundary to something like the start of the document (−), except it’s not actually the start because it excludes the title text for some reason.
Any time you drag over space between lines, it selects something else.
Yet another example of how maddening it still is when designing websites that have the same experience regardless of how it is viewed.
In-what? Unhappiness with a statistical outcome? Discouragement with events in one's home state?
Based on the many other uncorrected typos in the example SVG, I suspect that Inkscape has everything but a spell checker.
Apropos, Inkscape is a big app and does practically everything.
https://www.google.com/search?q=svg.nicubunu.ro seems to surface it, with text; https://www.google.com/search?q=site:svg.nicubunu.ro gets the title, but no more text. I’m curious how it decided what the title was. I wonder if they have some kind of “choose the largest text” heuristic if a title is missing.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=svg.nicubunu.ro and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:svg.nicubunu.ro don’t show a result.