Colour Fonts + MS Word + Windows Dark Mode

Albert Creus
Albert Creus Posts: 10
in Technique and Theory
I just found out some weird behaviour that was driving me mad and couldn't find any info about it online, so I thought on posting it for the sake of sharing and maybe in case I forget and I encounter the issue in the future.

Making a colour font, when using it in Word with Windows in dark mode the characters would default on their black (actually white) version, changing to light mode would bring them back to colour. Except other colour fonts like emojis would remain coloured no matter dark or light mode.

My coloured characters were letters and also characters in the unicode private area, hence Word would give them colour white when in dark mode, losing the colour. When moving my coloured symbols to unicodes in the Miscellaneous Symbols Script (where emoji usually lives), the characters wouldn't be 'painted white' by Word in dark mode.

So I guess Word only does this exception to preserve emojis colourful in dark mode, but not other characters in a font.

Thanks for listening.
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Comments

  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
    Interesting, I wasn't aware that MS Word supports color fonts, in the first place.
  • Albert Creus
    Albert Creus Posts: 10
    Surprisingly, MS Powerpoint (the software that doesn't support ligatures in 2024) does too. I guess emojis are a thing.
    But don't dare to print them or export to PDF, they disapear or are replaced to something else.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
    edited October 9
    That's really silly, I can't understand why they just simply implement color fonts decently. But as you said, they still don't support OT features, kerning, ligatures and all. I just bumped the TD thread, where OT features were requested. 

    People talk about AI while we still don't have kerning in probably the most used presentation app in the world :)
  • Daniel Yacob
    Daniel Yacob Posts: 14
    @Albert Creus I am amazed the PDF problem has persisted for so long, I first became aware of it in 2018.  My solution has been to copy a Word document over to a Macbook, open it there (cross my fingers that layout & formatting don't break), and then create the PDF there. I can take the PDF on a USB drive to print at an office center (no color printer at home) and the color comes out fine.

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