Layered colour font automation

ruzvaliakhmetov
ruzvaliakhmetov Posts: 1
edited August 26 in Font Technology


Hello everyone!
I would like to share a small project and ask for your opinion, since I don’t have much experience. For me, type design is more of a hobby than a job.
My question is about layered colour fonts. I’m experimenting with the idea of using the PostScript name field to add a kind of variable to automate font manipulations. As shown in the attached GIF, a designer types text with just one font (basically any single layer), and the other fonts are substituted automatically. Even for designs with cutouts like Glyphs Sapperlot, where layer order doesn’t matter, this approach can be helpful. First of all, you can add all the layers with one click, and secondly, it helps in colouring, applying global swatches. Also, I think you can invent many other use cases since it’s just a variable embedded into the PostScript name. 
Here I need to say that right now it’s a bit awkward; scripts don’t have an advanced UI to control colours. It’s a work in progress.
I put together a small demo on GitHub with fonts and scripts for Adobe Illustrator:
I know about SVG/COLR fonts, but since Adobe still poorly supports the change of colours, it seems that layered colour fonts are better, at least for print workflow.
What do you think? 
One concern I have is that, aside from the fact that colour fonts have a very limited scope of use, I suspect something like this might already exist – and I’m worried I may be reinventing the wheel.

P.S. I used Grammarly to edit this post. If it can be claimed as AI usage, this is it – use of AI.

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