Font Face/Font Declaration Proposal

[Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>]

Dear TC members,

following is a proposal for adding CSS2's/SVG's @font-facse declarations 
to the OASIS Open Office specification:

Since SVG has already adopted the CSS2 @font-face declaration with its 
<font-face> element (see 
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html#FontFaceElement), it seems to be 
reasonable to adopt this SVG <font-face> element.

What I would like to propose is to replace the existing 
<style:font-decl> element with a <style:font-face> element. This element 
has the same attributes and content as the SVG font-face element, with 
the following exceptions:

1) The attributes declared in %SVG.Core.attrib; (id, xml:base, xml:lang, 
xml:space) are not existing. This applies to the <style:font-decl> and 
to all its child elements.
2) The child elements declared in %SVG.Description.class (desc, title, 
metadata) are not existing.
3) All child elements are part of the style-namespace rather than of the 
svg-namespace, because they do not support the attributed declared in 
%SVG.Core.attrib;.
3) An (optional) "style:name" attribute is added. It assigns an unique 
name to the font-face declaration. This name can be used inside styles 
(i.e. as attribute of <stye:text-properties>) as value of the 
"style:font-name" attribute to immediately select a font declaration. If 
a font declaration is referenced this way, the steps decribed in the 
CSS2 font matching algorithms for selecting a font declaration based on 
the font-family, font-style, font-variant, font-weight and font-size 
descriptors will not take place, but the referenced font-face 
declaration is used directly.
4) The attributes "style:font-family-generic", "style:font-pitch" and 
"style:font-charset" of the former "<style:font-decl>" are added (as 
optional attributes like all attributes of <style:font-face>.
5) The attribute "style:font-adornments" is added. It is the former 
"style:font-style-name" attribute with a less confusing name.

Conforming applications should implement the CSS2 font matching 
alogorithm (see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#algorithm), but 
they may also implement variants of it. They are especially allowed to 
implement a font matching based only on the font face delclaration, that 
is, a font matching that is not applied to every character independently 
but only once for each font face declaration. This seems to be useful 
for editing appications, because font matching based on characters is 
very expensive.

In addition to adding the <style:font-face> element, I propose to rename 
the <office:font-decls> to <office:font-face-decls>, since this seems to 
be a better name after replacing <style:font-decl> with <style:font-face>.

I further propose to call the style:font-family-generic-*, 
style:font-pitch-*, style:font-charset-* and style:font-style-name-* 
attributes that can be contained in styles (i.e. attributes of 
<style:text-properties> to be deprecated. This means that they should 
not be used any longer. Instead of this, <style:font-face> elements 
should be used.

Best regards

Michael