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

mitradranirban
mitradranirban Posts: 141
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: 3,659
    Have you considered making this a PR to the Fontra project?
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    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: 141
    Meanwhile, I am creating documentation for Colr Pak. https://fonts.atipra.in/colrpak.html
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    New Updated version 0.2.1 is released
    Features include a dedicated Paint Tool to visually adjust Colr V1 paint
    and support for masterless Colr V1 paint variations 

  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    Version 0.3.0 of Colr Pak supports direct export of woff2 Webfonts for both COLR v0 and V1 fonts 
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    I have been contributing non color related improvement in Colr Pak back to upstream fontra, such as Webfont(woff2) export, update button in Linux and Windows msi installer
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,533
    mitradranirban said:
    I have been contributing non color related improvement in Colr Pak back to upstream fontra, such as Webfont(woff2) export, update button in Linux and Windows msi installer
    That's awesome!!!
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
     Creating animated emoji font with Colr Pak
    https://youtu.be/pkgm7viQ6Lo 
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,533
    This is really cool to see!
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    One of the main reason ColorFonts are not used much in web design is that the design apps do not show full potential of color fonts such as animation in design and color changing feature. 
    So I am presenting Colr Design Studio - a web app to show full potential of color fonts
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,659
    One of the main reason ColorFonts are not used much in web design is that the design apps do not show full potential of color fonts such as animation in design and color changing feature.
    That may be a reason, but I don’t think it is the main reason.

    Beyond emoji, there are very few examples of colour fonts, which also explains why they are not much used.

    It isn’t a coincidence that colour font formats quickly emerged shortly after Unicode formally encoded emoji as characters for textual interchange. Colour font formats exist primarily for emoji, and the fact that colour font formats had not emerged previously is indicative that no one thought they were needed for non-emoji text. There’s plenty of animated lettering on the Web and in video, and it doesn’t use colour fonts because animated lettering was something that had been solved in that design space long before colour fonts were introduced. Colour fonts, like emoji themselves, are a technology focused on mobile device communication.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,533
    Nice app! I found that animating both axes and palettes doesn't work just yet :) 
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 141
    Animating both palette and axis is not supported in any of the modern browsers, When browsers start supporting that, the app will also support

    Now generated css is also shown in Colr Design Studio, so that it can be copy pasted to easily use on any website 

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