Suggestions: Color Fonts coming out as Black Squares?

Supherb
Supherb Posts: 7
in Suggestions and Bug Reports
Hello fellow members,

Trying to get my first Colored fonts working. I am using Fontlabs 8, every time I export them, they just display as Black Squares, see the attached screen shot below.



Am new to typeface designing, so there is a lot to learn. What am I doing wrong? 

Comments

  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 267
    How are you viewing sample text?
  • Supherb
    Supherb Posts: 7
    Through Fontlabs, everything appears fine. But once exported, its looks like that ("Black Squares") everywhere else (e.g. Photoshop, Words, etc)

    The attached screenshot is on my Fontdue website. I already contacted admin, and they stated that the platform is compatible with Colored fonts, so it has to be an issue with exporting incorrectly, I would think, no?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,089
    edited June 7
    Which color font format(s) are you exporting in?

    I am also wondering if it might be something to do with vertical metrics.

    Maybe run it through Fontbakery (or its Rust-based successor, Fontspector) and see what it reports, have somebody who knows these tools well take a look at the report.
  • Supherb
    Supherb Posts: 7
    edited June 7
    I believe, I exported them in OpenType+COLR.

    I should mention, all my colored glyphs are bitmap (rasterized), they were created in Photoshop, then imported into Fontlabs for kerning, and such.

    Is there a different process for converting colored bitmap letters into a functional font, via Fontlabs?

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,516
    edited June 7
    The COLR format is an outline format. For bitmap glyphs, try exporting as one or more of the colour bitmap formats: sbix, CBDT. I think bitmaps can also be embedded within the SVG format, but am no 100% sure of that.

    Note that you can export a font supporting multiple different colour formats, but if you want to test which are working and in what environmments you might first want to make separate test fonts for each format.

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