Is there any reason why such a chromatic OpenType font could not work on another platform, such as the Windows xp system that is running on the computer that I am using, provided that there were a suitable application program to use it in?
I have added a note, referencing this thread, to the thread “Galileo Lettering font” in the Gallery forum so as to bring that thread to the top of the list as the thread is about a collection of TrueType fonts that could provide glyph artwork for producing a chromatic OpenType font.
Would it be possible for High-Logic to produce a stand-alone wordprocessor program that could use such a chromatic font?
The ability of High-Logic to react rapidly to new situations could mean that High-Logic could be the first to make available such a product for use on older systems.
I cannot help but think that this will be an extension to the format that will be very slow to be taken up and supported by applications.
I hope that you won’t waste any time on supporting it in FontCreator until it is widely supported by Word-processors, DTP applications, and browsers.
There is much more that deserves priority over this for FontCreator 8 and beyond, such as improvements to kerning and full OpenType feature support.
Embedded bitmap support might be a step needed towards support for colour in fonts, but I would prefer to see a vector format like Mozilla’s SVG suggestion implemented in the specification. Coloured Emoticons could just as well be created using SVG or PNG as by supporting them fonts. Coloured text with all kinds of gradient or bitmap fills is already possible in DTP and drawing applications.
It could be possible, but we’ll first have to wait for the specs.
Here is how it will work:
There is a base glyph / fallback glyph in case one doesn’t want color enabled fonts.
And one or more glyphs; each with a palette index (color). However the font designer can allow the user to choose a color as well.
Then combine them to make a colorful character:
It seems transparency is also supported, as well as multiple palettes, to address the color background issues for example.
So far this raises more and more questions, so we just have to wait for the specs…
FontCreator 7.5, released in August 2013, allows you to make your own colour fonts, as it fully supports the new multi-color font extension which Microsoft added in Windows 8.1.
Things are moving forward, as with the latest release of Mozilla Firefox (version 32.0 available through the official Mozilla release channel since September 2, 2014) the Microsoft color technology is supported! They don’t use the Windows API DirectDraw, but implemented color support themselves, so I suspect it is available on several platforms.
The upcoming update of Windows 10, scheduled for this summer will most likely support OpenType SVG color fonts. This rumor comes from a very respectable person, so it must be true.
Great news, and this might be the best reason for us to start supporting this color format soon.
While doing some other tests in Word 2016, I was really surprised to see color font support in Word!
It has some flaws in it (the auto color for text after a color glyph is set to white, so will become invisible; manually setting that back to black fixes it sort of), but this is another step forward for color fonts!
The Vivaldi Browser already supports Colour Fonts, and that is based on the Blink/Chromium rendering engine, so I guess that Chrome Browser supports it too.
I took a look at Segoe Emojji in FontCreator. Some of the colour glyphs have more members than will fit on the Members palette without scrolling, so maybe that needs a slight resdesign to make it show horizontally, or in more columns?
We’ve just released FontCreator 13, coming with support for both scalable color font extensions. So now you can create OpenType color fonts with either COLR, SVG (or both).
