Introducing Colr Pak - a free open source editor for COLR v0 and v1 fonts

mitradranirban
mitradranirban Posts: 130
in Type Design Software

Color Pak is a cross-platform desktop application for designing and editing color fonts. It is a fork of Fontra Pak, extended with dedicated tooling for COLRv0 and COLRv1 color font authoring — including a visual paint graph editor, palette management, and gradient handles directly on the canvas.

Your fonts stay entirely on your computer and are never uploaded anywhere

Key Features

  • COLRv1 Paint Graph Editor — visually compose  PaintSolid, PaintLinearGradient, PaintRadialGradient, PaintSweepGradient, PaintGlyph, PaintTranslate, PaintScale, PaintRotate, PaintSkew, and PaintTransform nodes per glyph.
  • COLRv0 Layer Mapping — manage color layer stacks with palette index assignments for simpler color fonts.
  • One-click COLRv0 → COLRv1 Upgrade — automatically convert an existing v0 layer mapping into an equivalent COLRv1 PaintColrLayers structure.
  • Masterless COLRv1 Variation (WIP) — author variable color parameters (gradient stops, transform values, alpha) as independent per-axis keyframes, without requiring separate outline masters.
  • Live Canvas Rendering — see COLRv1 paint effects rendered in real time on the glyph canvas as you edit.
  • Palette Management — define and switch between multiple color palettes; the active palette is reflected immediately in the canvas preview.
  • Full Fontra Editing Core — all standard Fontra editing features (glyph drawing, variable font axes, anchors, components, etc.) are included. 
Public Release 0.1.0 is now available for Linux,Microsoft Windows and MacOS (both Apple Sillicon and Intel newer that MacOs 10.15) . Installation instructions are available at https://github.com/mitradranirban/colr-pak/blob/main/INSTALLATION.md 
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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,620
    Have you considered making this a PR to the Fontra project?
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 130
    Fontra project chief developer has categorically stated that color support is not in his immediate roadmap. Moreover even when fontra decides to support color font, my LLM generated code is unlikely to be accepted, considering Just is so antithetic to all things AI.
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 130
    Meanwhile, I am creating documentation for Colr Pak. https://fonts.atipra.in/colrpak.html

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