title: SVG font glyphs: ever seen contained path's?
body: <p>I have a source of SVG files created by program potrace, which has created a separate  for each component of a multi-segment character.  If I simple-mindedly create glyph definitions using these same &lt;path>s the character will not display.  If I jam all the path instructions into the "d=" attribute of the &lt;glyph> the character displays.  </p>
  
  <p>The SVG spec <em>says</em> that &lt;glyph> elements are containers and explicitly says they can contain &lt;path> elements.  It just doesn't work (tested in Chrome, Opera, Safari).</p>
  
  <p>Here's the smallest example I could cut down to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
    &lt;meta charset="utf-8" /&gt;
    &lt;title&gt;SVG font test sample04&lt;/title&gt;
    &lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
       @font-face {
         font-family: 'sample04';
         src: url('sample04.svg#sample04') format('svg');
       }
      .sample04 { font-family: "sample04", verdana, helvetica; }
    &lt;/style&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body class="sample04"&gt; xE014  | &amp;#xE014; | &amp;#xE015; | &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>sample04.svg</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?&gt;
  &lt;svg version="1.1" xmlns = 'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'&gt;
    &lt;defs&gt;
      &lt;font id="sample04" horiz-adv-x="800"&gt;
        &lt;font-face font-family="sample04" /&gt;
        &lt;glyph unicode="&amp;#xE014;" horiz-adv-x="800" 
                d="M0,0h200v200h-200z M400,0h200v200h-200z"/&gt;
        &lt;glyph unicode="&amp;#xE015;" horiz-adv-x="800"&gt;
          &lt;path d="M0,0h200v200h-200z"/&gt;
          &lt;path d="M400,0h200v200h-200z"/&gt;
        &lt;/glyph&gt;
      &lt;/font&gt;
    &lt;/defs&gt;
  &lt;/svg&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note that the two glyphs have the same information, the first contained entirely within the &lt;glyph> d= attribute, the second having the information separated into two &lt;path> elements.  I have tried with just a single &lt;path> element with no better results.</p>
  
  <p>So is this just another case where specs are sparkly and browsers are not up to it?</p>
  
  <p>Note: the reason I care so much is that I have nearly 5000 of these SVG files to embed into a font, and didn't really want to get so heavily into XML transformations to convert the sources...</p>