Since the very beginning of digital type, there has been a need for multi-color fonts. Not all type designers believe the solution lies within the font itself, but especially last year things have moved towards that direction.
A couple of years ago Apple introduced an emoji multi-color font which basically uses a png image for each glyph. With Windows 8.1 Microsoft introduced their own multi-color technology which is scalable (vector based), but doesn’t support gradients etc. And there have been several other parties with different ways to add colors to fonts.
See also this topic about color fonts:
Colors Join OpenType Font Format
At this very moment people are working hard to add this new technology to the official font standard. There is an ad hoc group (AHG) for the development and editing of the Open Font Format specification ISO/IEC 14496-22 which is currently reviewing and processing three different proposals at MPEG meetings.
Stakeholders include Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, W3C, and Monotype. The AHG recommends integrating the new Color Font technology (and MATH table specification) in the 3rd edition of the ISO/IEC 14496-22 “Open Fonts Format” standard. Although it says “integrating the new Color Font technology”, it actually means all three proposed color extensions will become part of the specification.
It took more than a decade for the industry to support OpenType Layout tables, and there are still numerous issues, as you never know which O.S. or software supports which feature. So how long will it take before color support is fully supported? Will this start a color battle?