Installing and Using a Color Font

[mars]

Hi,
I created a full color font in Font Creator v7.5.0 (build 519). The software let me create the font, and appeared to let me export it...but when I install it, I can't use it in programs like Word or Photoshop correctly. The font appears, but not with the color fills.
The color fills are necessary in this case, because I trying to create a Celtic font like those used in the Book of Kells. An example of the way the font characters 'should' look, is in the attached jpg.
Is there a way to do this? I hoped to create a font set like this for people to use when trying to do traditional Celtic art work. In that case, the color is required.
Alternately, is there a way to use the font this way? A work around of some sort?
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated!
Mars Dion

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Most apps don't support colour fonts yet.

Watch the demo on the home page and this previous thread

You need Windows 8.1 preview and IE11. I am not sure if Word will support colour fonts on Windows 8.1.

[WalczakPhoto]

post removed by user.

[William]

Ok...not trying to be rude here AT ALL, but I must admit that I'm more than a little curious...why would you want to create a font with a specific color already assigned to it?

Each glyph can include more than one colour.

William Overington

26 March 2014

[honest.bern]

Suppose you want to use a Hebrew font on a web page, and have the letters one colour, and the points another. There are complicated ways to do this but they do not give consistent results across different browsers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do this by changing the font without any fancy mark-up?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I think coloured fonts were introduced with mobile Apps in mind, but they could also be useful for desktop interfaces.

[Erwin Denissen]

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?

[Erwin Denissen]

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?

COLR version 1 was introduced with OpenType Specification v 1.9 back in December 2021, and that comes with more advanced color features like gradients. Right now FontCreator only supports COLR version 0, but if more people are interested, we will consider adding support for version 1.

COLR version 1 is also adopted by many web browsers (see https://caniuse.com/colr-v1), so COLR is here to stay.

Today I noticed my OpenType-SVG fonts no longer display correctly in Edge version 102.0.1245.30 (Official build) (64-bit), but I am not sure if this is officially abandoned by Microsoft or just a glitch on my computer running Windows 11...

https://pixelambacht.nl/chromacheck/

chromacheck.png (102.22 KiB) Viewed 3640 times

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

As expected, I get the same result in Vivaldi.

Firefox supports SVG, but not some other formats.

Firefox Support.png (14.36 KiB) Viewed 3635 times