Hello Everyone,
This is my first post to Typedrawers, which kindly allowed me to
register--even though I confesed I'm not a proper type/font expert
or designer. Hopefully this is the right posting category?
Question
---------
Do any of you know of an easy-to-use tool for creating, or converting
to, a chromatic font in CBDT/CBLC format? That works on Windows?
(NotoColorEmoji.ttf is an example of a font in CBDT/CBLC format, tho'
more complicate than needed here. I've no idea about how that font was
created ...)
I've made a .ttf font with approx 80 chars, about half of which are
in the PUA. The glyphs are very simple: nearly all have outlines
comprising straight line segments only.
This font needs to be converted to the Google CBDT/CBLC format. (It
may not be coolest chromatic font format these days, but I'm stuck
with it.)
The starting point is a plain .ttf font, as above. The desired
end-point is an identical font, i.e. the same glyph/charset & the
same glyph shapes, with all the glyphs colored plain blue or red,
for example, in CBDT/CBLC format. No fancy shading, or mingled
colors, or anything: just the same single, uniform color applied to
every glyph in the font.
The ideal solution would be a converter, commercial or free, from
COLR/CPAL to CBDT/CBLC, or from plain .ttf to CBDT/CBLC. It must
work on Windows 7. Does such a tool exist?
AFAICS Transtype cannot convert from COLR/CPAL to CBDT/CBLC.
Failing this (very likely, I guess) can anyone recommend a
consultancy or font developer with the toolset and skills to
make this conversion? Or another list to post this plea for help?
This is a one-off, or two iterations at most, requirement.
FontLab itself may have the capability in one way or another, but
I can't go down that road, owing to license cost and learning
curve/time issues (that's my problem, not a criticism of FontLab).
Ditto wrt Adobe Illustrator, et al.
With thanks and regards,
Rick
0
Comments
If you have a separate input font for each of your two colors, AFAIK you could create such a font with TransType 4 as well.
I've just read Adam Twardoch's great post:
https://blog.fontlab.com/font-tech/color-fonts/color-font-format-proposals/
which provides confidence that FontLab should be able to do the
job, before breakfast probably. I'd skipped that article, as it seemed
too old. How wrong I was!
What would be the best site to post a job offer for this work,
do you think? It would need to be a site where FontLab experts lurk.
(Apologies if the answer is obvious to type experts--it's an unfamiliar
world for me.) I may need to do the conversion twice. And I need to
check if the CBDT/CBLC format is 'resilient' between different screen
resolutions including HiDpi.
My starting point was installing the Noto Color Emoji font. It provided an
illustration of a solution to the problem I'm trying to solve (for a
colleague who's developing a GUI app on Windows using Qt).
There's more b/g info here. (More than I was hoping ever to know!)
https://rawgit.com/behdad/color-emoji/master/specification/v1.html
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/eblc.htm
Noodling around a ttx dump of the NotoColorEmoji.ttf, *very* amateurishly,
it would seem this CBDT/CBLC font:
- Only has one strike. Only one set of strikedata, at anyrate.
- All bitmap chars have ppemY and ppemX set to 109.
- Only uses imageFormat 17
My already-drawn font comprises roughly 40 glyphs (2x more codepoints),
all very simple shapes, intended for use as special-character indicators--
to indicate the presence of typographic spaces, ZWSP, ZWNJ, WJ, PDF, and
so on, as you see in most text processing GUIs. It should result in a small
CBDT/CBLC font, relatively speaking.
So, based on the foregoing, there should be no huge problem in automating
the conversion from a non-CBDT/CBLC .ttf to a CBDT/CBLC .ttf. First, I guess,
generate a set of PNGs from the .ttf outlines, each with the same height,
ppemX/Y values; but different width, left/right bearing, and AW values,
automatically derived pro-rata from the values in the original .ttf.
Alternatively, FontCreator easily makes a CPAL version of the font, which
could be used as the starting point.
The FontLab forums have a 'Jobs' category. So I'll head over there to see if
anyone is willing to try some paid-for experimentation. And leave you all in
peace for now.
Thanks very much for your interest and advice so far. I'll report back
if/when I make progress on this.