What's your sense of the market for color fonts today? Are there particular color-font formats that are sought in the market? Do single-color fonts made to stack on top of each other see more use among graphic designers? Are type-buyers knowledgable about what to buy and how to use? What would be the best means of delivery of a typeface that is intended to have multiple, different-colored layers (but not necessarily pre-chosen colors)?
0
Comments
Over the years I've used "layered" fonts many times in ads and the like.
Without access to a colored font's color palette, I personally do not see the utility in them.
If having these as in a single font is not a necessity, a package of layered fonts would work best, I think. This would depend on what you want the layers for – if you're looking to allow the user to only change the color and not the shape of the glyphs, then I don't see why you wouldn't simply ship a simple font and let them deal with changing the colours.
As an aside, I would have expected the SVG colour palette option to be available by now, but I supposed this is a chicken and egg problem. Doesn't help that colour fonts, as a whole, were overshadowed by variable fonts.
Even if they would be, I think it would be hard to define that that particular font data is OK to modify, while others bits aren't. Seems like a can of worms, to me but I don't know enough about the legal side here.
It's just a matter of a slightly different EULA for color fonts. For big distributors that have standard agreements they could provide a separate color font desktop EULA. Maybe add something to the filename so the system knows that a font is okay for modification. like blahblah_color.otf That way existing color fonts won't be modified without an override check and new fonts that allow modification of the color table won't nag users.
The problem persists in the inverse—by keeping live type in your files they are vulnerable to changes if the user later changed the palette of the color font for a different project.
While I have never used it, DJR's Color Font Customizer is very intriguing. It allows users to upload their licensed color font, change the colors, and then save out a new version.
In an OpenType font, the COLR format relies on colour palettes defined in a CPAL table. The SVG format can make use of colour palettes defined in the CPAL table, or fixed colours set by the font developer within the SVG document.
For both CPAL and SVG, there is a way to specify that the (application determined) text foreground colour be used.
For CPAL palettes, a font can define alternate palettes (they must have the same number of entries), and the application can choose which palette to use. The application could potentially also allow the user to define a custom palette. This is explicitly mentioned in the SVG table chapter of the OT spec; it's not called out in the COLR table chapter, but the same would apply—from the OT spec perspective, that's a higher-level protocol decision.