Convention on descriptive names for color fonts with separate tables

Michael Rafailyk
Michael Rafailyk Posts: 197
in Font Technology
It seems that the color fonts battle is leaning towards COLR table eventually becoming the standard, at least on the web. However, Adobe still only supports OpenType-SVG table, which complicates production. One of the options is to include both tables (COLR and OT-SVG) in one font file, but practice has shown that in some applications and web browsers this leads to the fact that the font does not display because the wrong table is used. Therefore, the safest option for now is to provide two separate versions of the color font with different tables.

The difficulty of such a separation is that you need to explain to the user as early as possible (before purchasing) which version he needs – to avoid a situation where the user has purchased the color font style with a wrong table and it does not display in a particular application or web browser. For a casual user who is new to this, it is pretty darn difficult, and when it comes to licensing, it becomes even more confusing:
Adobe: Desktop license / OTF/TTF format / SVG table.
Affinity: Desktop license / OTF/TTF format / COLR table.
Website: Webfont license / WOFF/WOFF2 format / COLR table.

The first thing we can do is to give descriptive style names, second – provide instructions. And it would be nice to have some naming conventions. Here are a few options that come to mind.

1. Specifying a table after a style name:
  • Family Style COLR
  • Family Style SVG
2. Specifying that it is an OpenType-SVG and not an old SVG table:
  • Family Style COLR
  • Family Style OTSVG
3. Noting of which one is needed for Adobe apps:
  • Family Style (...?)
  • Family Style Adobe
Maybe you have a better practice?
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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,484
    I’d go with option 1.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 300
    Michael Rafailyk said:
    However, Adobe still only supports OpenType-SVG table, 
    Note that latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator support COLR table (both version 1 and 2). InDesign still doesn’t support it, though.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 263
    I see that Photoshop, at least, now supports COLRv0 fonts. I verified this using the Segoe UI Emoji font on Windows 11, which includes both COLR v0 and v1 glyph data. The following screenshot shows the v0 presentation in Photoshop compared to the v1 presentation in Notepad.

  • Michael Rafailyk
    Michael Rafailyk Posts: 197
    Khaled Hosny Thanks for the insight, it sounds good!
    Still, there should be some transitional period (up to ~5 years?) while some users continue to use older versions of Photoshop / Illustrator and until InDesign gets COLR support.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,061
    As the Adobe apps in question are only available by subscription, and that has been true longer than their color font support, I think the transitional period will be relatively short — as long as all the apps in question do get the COLR font support added. I mean, somebody can choose to run an older version, but they will have access to the newer versions as well. (Unless hardware limitations or the like keep them on an older version.)

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