I added some coloured Stylistic Alternates for fancy drop capitals to some of my fonts, just because I can using
FontCreator from High-Logic, but I don't currently have any application that can support them for print or PDF publications. I can only test them in browsers such as Firefox or Vivaldi, which support the technology.
I am not much interested in Emojji, as I don't use a mobile.
Web Fonts Test PageIt is not particularly difficult to do for 2-4 colours, and very easy for single coloured glyphs. I wrote a tutorial for
creating glyphs with four coloursI don't have much need for it, but those who are more creative than I am may find a use for it.
Comments
If Adobe and Apple get color fonts working well I might explore the possibilities again. Until then I’m just writing color fonts off as a train wreck that I can’t fix.
> I am not much interested in Emojji, as I don't use a mobile.
Funny, I use a mobile, but I'm still not at all interested in emoji.
Type designers would provide to the distributor, color fonts using layers, they way they've been doing it since the stone age. On the distributor site, the customer has a option to buy separate layers and/or color fonts. There's an interface on the site that allows the customer to adjust the colors and alter layers...with some presets of course. And out pops the customer's custom color font. If they change their mind, they can generate as many as they like.
Of course, maybe applications will allow users to define colors but I very much doubt that it'll ever happen or if it does, it'll be limited to one or two applications. It just doesn't make sense to generate colour combinations in the hopes that it's exactly what a customer wants.
As for emoji. It looks like a fun project but I can't see a practical want anyone can actually use one. Again, it would have to be commissioned for a specific application to be commercially viable.
Please elaborate (since I can't see anything special in that image).
OpenType feature support has taken a decade to become even slightly widespread. It might be a while longer before we see wider application support, but it is improving. Here's a few applications that could benefit from colour glyphs.
Ah, OK.
This is an interesting angle. Two questions:
1: How well supported is this?
2: What order are the black and white rendered in?
To me the most promising thing about colorfonts is grays.
2. In one glyph I decide about rendering order (exactly like in SVG file) and every next glyph overlapp previous.
Biggest problem (for me) is that colorfonts with gradients looks best on black background
--color0: hotpink
.It's probably not a big surprise that none of this works in browsers yet. SVG doesn't even take its colors from the CPAL table yet — it only uses the ones hardcoded in the font or the regular text color defined in CSS (e.g.
color: hotpink
). The latter could be useful for both Gluk's examples: the fill could always be white but the outline and shadow could take its color from CSS in the first font, and if the gradient can always be black and the fill color taken from CSS in the second font.(On a side note, CPAL only takes RGBA values so for print something custom needs to be made by the design software to assign colors, I suppose.)
And transparency and gradients.
Today I also learnt about another font with similar idea, though for a different script.
Underware did a great presentation at typolabs, you can find the link yourself if you do video, from this year, showing their work which is new and excellent. They based the drawing path of the glyphs on skeletons, time, and the font also has hundreds and hundreds of alternates.
In the same way that Hangul uses character density to discreetly convey grammatical information, color could serve to really help along reading. In contrast, handwriting is now mostly for post-it notes to oneself...
Animated type in general though I think has potential.
BTW, not remotely a fan of skeletons, but here's a link to that: