Hello,

I am using Inkscape on OSX and XP, and Linux in the near future. I would like to edit and move around SVG graphics on all these platforms without quality loss. When it comes to text, my real world experience is that different platforms have different font availability, i.e. Arial versus Helvetica. This means that text positioning, formatting and rendering is a problem when continuing an edit on a different platform.

In an ideal world, there would be a non-zero size subset of fonts pre-installed by default on all (three in my case) platforms. Installing one common font (or two, serif and sans serif) on all platforms would be one way, but then portability is still an issue if you send the SVG file to someone elses computer with only standard OS and inkscape installation.

What would currently be the best approach to make inkscape-edited SVG files including text portable between platforms?

Best regards

Klaus

You can download the standard set of Windows fonts for your linux, I think you can do the same for osx too

I guess that would solve the portability problem between your machines, if you use one of those fonts that is.

To get it displayed the same on someone elses machine the safest thing is to convert your text to paths. It wont be editable as text so the other person will only be able to see it displayed in the font you chose but wont be able to edit it as text. Does the other person need the editing capabilities?

Maybe you can find a free font with good readability and recommend everyone involved to install it, and always use that font in your svg text documents.

The main fonts used on the web are:

* Arial
* Helvetica
* Times New Roman / Times
* Courier New / Courier

Because these will 99.9% definitely be installed on Windows, Linux and OSX.

The following are usually pretty safe to use, although it's slightly less likely that linux / unix users won't have them installed. I'm fairly certain that most new distributions of linux do have these installed by default though.

* Verdana
* Georgia
* Comic Sans MS
* Trebuchet MS
* Arial Black
* Impact

I have always assumed that if displayed the same in the browser they will in Inkscape / SVG - is that naive?

Hello,

The Helvetica font would have been appreciated, but it is not in my Windows XP installation.

Second best is some free font, and I have been pointed to ttf files, Truetype versions of the Computer Modern fonts that go along with TeX and LaTeX. So far I got it working on both XP and OSX, and I am confident it shall work out on Linux as well, where our sysadmins shall install Inkscape with the next Redhat upgrade.

Cheers

Klaus

As far as the looks go, you can use Arial as Helvetica, its very close

http://www.iliveonyourvisits.com/helvetica/