Atelier\Text

Text placed in an SVG depends on the fonts of whoever opens it. This package removes that dependency: it reads a font file, looks each codepoint up in its cmap, positions the glyphs, and returns their outlines as path data. What ships is geometry, and geometry renders the same everywhere.

Features

• Outlines, not text elements
  Path data from the font's own contours, so nothing depends on what is installed where the drawing is opened.
• One group per glyph
  Each carries a data-char attribute, and idPrefix makes the ids deterministic, which is what a stylesheet or an animation needs to address a single letter.
• Placement is arguments
  x, baselineY, letterSpacing and wordSpacing are parameters of the call, not post-processing. baselineY is the line the glyphs sit on, not the top of the text.
• A file or a query
  fromFile() takes a path; fromFinder() takes a FontQuery of family, weight and style against a directory of fonts.
• A seam for real shaping
  The built-in mapper is one cmap lookup per codepoint. TextShaperInterface is where a shaping engine plugs in, and everything downstream consumes its GlyphRun.
• A missing glyph throws
  MissingGlyphException rather than a blank where a letter should be. A size that is not finite and positive throws too.

Draw a word as path data

use Atelier\Text\SvgText;

$path = SvgText::fromFile('Inter-Regular.woff2')
    ->path('Atelier', size: 64, baselineY: 72);

echo $path->d();

d() is the combined outline of the whole run, ready to drop into a drawing you are already building.

Get a whole document

$svg = SvgText::fromFile('Inter-Regular.woff2')
    ->svg('Atelier', size: 64, idPrefix: 'headline');

echo $svg->toPrettyString();

An atelier/svg document, one group per glyph. Passing idPrefix makes those ids deterministic, so headline-glyph-0 can be targeted from CSS or animated.

Choose a font by query

use Alto\Font\FontFinder;
use Alto\Font\FontQuery;

$finder = FontFinder::fromDirectories(__DIR__.'/fonts');

$font = SvgText::fromFinder($finder, FontQuery::family('Inter')->weight(700));
$path = $font->path('Atelier', size: 64);

What it does not do

One cmap lookup per codepoint, left to right. No font fallback, no bidirectional text, no ligatures, no kerning, no script shaping. That is a boundary, not a gap: everything downstream consumes a GlyphRun, so a real shaping engine replaces the mapper without touching the rest.

A codepoint the font has no glyph for throws MissingGlyphException rather than rendering a blank.

Install

The source is at github.com/ateliersvg/text. There is no release yet, and no Packagist entry, so composer require has nothing to fetch.

It will need PHP 8.4 and ext-mbstring, one version ahead of the rest of the range. WOFF2 files also need a Brotli decoder that alto/font supports: either ext-brotli or the brotli binary.