The gradient should look amazing for Chinese/Japanese/Korean stroke-based scripts. I can't wait to see them being developed.<p>The Arabic scripts look amazing! Gradient support is bigger than color support imo
Next up is sound and interactivity in emojis, including a custom emoji scripting language and <i>emoji platform</i>, and then the inevitable "DOOM ported to emoji" projects.<p>And of course, web browsers and text rendering become increasingly more complex and expensive to build/maintain because Google single-handedly decided it.
A nice example, not currently available on Google fonts AFAICT, is 'Gilbert': <a href="https://www.typewithpride.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.typewithpride.com</a>
What's up with svg fonts? I suppose this is a binary format, and presumably smaller and faster to parse than compressed SVG fonts, but I admit I'm a bit surprised that this isn't an improvement to an existing SVG font ecosystem and is instead it's own thing.<p>It seems that if this was legitimately useful (instead of just one more thing competitors are obligated to spend money on implementing) we'd have seen SVG fonts used for it already.
>> Even if you’ve never heard of “color fonts,” you probably use them everyday<p>"every day". as in "each day". The word "everyday" is an adjective.
I'm surprised at how fun this article is, and how gorgeous fonts can look. And, it makes me, at least for a few seconds, want to switch back to Chrome from Firefox.
On a vaguely related note, I recall that classic Macintosh, sometime in the 1990s, had (possibly unofficial and/or hackish) operating system support for colour bitmap fonts. But I can't find any reference to this on Wikipedia or Google searches.<p>I wonder if anyone else remembers this; perhaps there's an opportunity to document/archive something about typography which might otherwise get forgotten.
Unfortunately there is no support for COLRv1 fonts on Safari (desktop or mobile).[0] There is support for COLRv0, so hopefully this will come to Safari/Webkit at some point.[1]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr-v1" rel="nofollow">https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr-v1</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr" rel="nofollow">https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr</a>
> With the ability to add variable axes too, the possibilities for customizing a COLRv1 font are literally infinite!<p>Is it literally infinite, or is it a very large number? As far as I understand it, variable fonts are defined by ranges of finite length, and all CSS color spaces I know of are finite too. I'm being roughly a little pedantic, but mostly just wondering why they wrote it this way, and if I'm missing something. Big fans of Rob Lowe maybe?
This makes me feel old. I'm glad that the option is available for people that want and enjoy this kind of design, but for my part I'll probably disable this feature and continue to block custom fonts.<p>Still, it's interesting to see that there's still room for innovation in the font space, even if I'm not in the target demographic.
An interesting idea for a color font is a terminal font automatically supporting terminal colors (by the terminal escape characters). Sometimes you just pipe your output somewhere which isn't a real terminal, and having color support would be nice if all you needed to do was change fonts.
There are a few nice color fonts I have used in the past. One of my favorite is Raleway Color Semibold by Vidhunnan Murugan: <a href="https://typewithraleway.firebaseapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://typewithraleway.firebaseapp.com</a>
Does anyone here know how to connect with the folks working on this at Google (or elsewhere)? My work focuses on the intersection of color and text, so I would be interested to know who else is thinking about these topics. (Contact is in profile.)
Hm. I think it may now be possible to encode an entire NFT collection in a font.<p>Anyway, hopefully Firefox will add support for COLRv1, at least for some platforms. FreeType has it apparently.
Perhaps a naive question, as I don't understand this domain very well. How are these fonts different than, say just changing the color of the text?
In the future, there are no fonts. We will just send and receive streams of strokes.<p>And then people who need it will use OCR to translate into text. Which won't always work very well.
For some reason Google Fonts rendering is just awful on my (Windows) machines. I tried to investigate, but got nowhere. They seem extremely jaggy and with uneven strokes, like they were only tested on 4K displays. I don't have the budget to go beyond 1080 at the moment.<p>This has made me extremely averse to them, to the point where I simply avoid sites using them.<p>And now they add color...