Pheeeew! Indeed. It was quite a challenge. After spending two months into building a custom text layout engine, we ended up throwing all the code out the window, mostly because the performance was terrible with more than a few hundred characters. Beside this, there were a gazillion other scenarios that we could not simply cover (kerning, spacing, i18n, ligatures, cross browser differences & so on).
We ended up using foreignObject for rendering text, with the compromise that we need to look for solutions to enable pure svg export. This is still a technical debt on our plate.
A roundtrip solution that converts hybrid SVG into PostScript and then back into SVG may work... we'll see.
Either way, we'll start writing some technical articles on our blog, so others can take advantage of our findings (we really owe a LOT to the community)
That is awesome, thanks for sharing. I'm very interested, as I'm sure many others are, to hear about the tools you've used and the development process. Great app!
We ended up using foreignObject for rendering text, with the compromise that we need to look for solutions to enable pure svg export. This is still a technical debt on our plate. A roundtrip solution that converts hybrid SVG into PostScript and then back into SVG may work... we'll see.
Either way, we'll start writing some technical articles on our blog, so others can take advantage of our findings (we really owe a LOT to the community)