System Font Dialog / Font Data

[markusmoenig]

This is related to #3379 which is about getting a FontFace from a system font dialog to allow the user to select a system font to draw with in the 2D canvas.

Apart from getting a FontFace, it would also be great to get the font data of the font itself (OpenFont / TrueType). Paired with something like https://opentype.js.org one could:

• Implement custom font rasterization engines which surpass the limited text capabilities of the 2D canvas for sophisticated text rendering applications. This would make Illustrator like applications possible in the browser.

• Triangulate the font data into 3D meshes which can be processed with WebGL or custom rendering technologies (SDF, Raytracing etc.). This would allow full featured 3D applications in the browser.

[junov]

Not sure, but perhaps this feature belong in the CSS font loading spec

I imagine it would look something like this:

partial interface FontFace {
    Promise<Blob> getRawData();
}

[annevk]

cc @tabatkins @svgeesus

[tabatkins]

Yeah, exposing the raw font data would be something done off of FontFace, thus an issue for the Font Loading spec in CSS.

[annevk]

There's also https://github.com/WICG/local-font-access now. Closing this.