Support Colour Fonts

[prochurchmedia]

Hi, I am using Affinity Designer. I have a font installed called 'Scrapbook Custom'. It shows up fine in the font dropdown window. But, when I go to type, nothing shows up. The glyphs window is also blank. The text also shows up in the layers panel, so it is typing. Any ideas?

 

[prochurchmedia]

I should also add, it works fine in Photoshop on my Mac, as well as ProCreate (iPad)

[kenmcd]

Cannot analyze it properly at the moment, but a quick look on my phone shows it is a color font.

Affinity apps do not yet support color fonts.

[Sean P]

Unfortunately Colour Fonts are not yet supported, so I'm going to move this to feature requests.

[prochurchmedia]

Ok, thanks. I need to remove the link to the font download above in my comment, how do I do this?

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, prochurchmedia said:

Ok, thanks. I need to remove the link to the font download above in my comment, how do I do this?

If you look at that post do you see an Edit link at the bottom? If so, click it, make your change, and Save it.

[prochurchmedia]

Yeah, I tried that and it said I could no longer edit the post. Then when I refreshed, the option was gone to edit anything.

[Sean P]

Hi Prochurchmedia,

I've removed that link for you now. Unfortunately 'New Members' (as in those in the New Members group) are restricted from editing their posts to avoid spam bots.

[kenmcd]

 

On 8/4/2020 at 2:25 PM, prochurchmedia said:

 I have a font installed called 'Scrapbook Custom'

Where is this font from?
I could not find it with a search, and there is no link to the designer (Megan Watson) in the font metadata.

It appears the font is an Apple SBIX color font.

[prochurchmedia]

I made the font myself. It’s available on a site called Tooolkit. prochurchmediauniversity.com/toolkit 

It is a color font. I’d love to know when this gets added to AD. Is this a feature that is being worked towards?

[MikeW]

14 minutes ago, prochurchmedia said:

I made the font myself. It’s available on a site called Tooolkit. prochurchmediauniversity.com/toolkit 

It is a color font. I’d love to know when this gets added to AD. Is this a feature that is being worked towards?

I had downloaded your font and have now deleted it. I hadn't had the time to review it to see if it worked in QXP for certain (one of a few desktop applications that support it and the only one that handles COLR, SVG & SBIX), but if you are using the sbix format as indicated above and desire to have wider adoption on desktop applications, consider redoing them as svg format. SVG OTF format has wider adoption for desktop applications.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Colour fonts work in web browsers. How hard can it be to implement?

Anyone who wants to test this can find some coloured fonts on my website. 

Odana is an example with multi-coloured glyphs.

If I remember rightly, they use the COLR format, not SVG. 

[fde101]

20 hours ago, Bhikkhu Pesala said:

Colour fonts work in web browsers. How hard can it be to implement?

If you think that web browsers only support things that are easy to implement, you need a serious reality check.

That said, I get the impression that this particular omission has more to do with priorities than with complexity.

While I too would like to see strong support for color and variable fonts, there are many other things missing from the Affinity apps which I would agree should have a much higher priority at the moment - footnotes/endnotes, global layers, cross-references, more vector manipulations, a dog tool...  just to name a few.

[kenmcd]

Segoe UI Emoji is a COLR color font.
So when support was added for color emojis it also added support for other COLR fonts.
The support is not 100% as you cannot select a palette (if the font has more than the default),
and there is no support for changing the colors (even if the font supports it).

But COLR color fonts do work in Affinity apps now.

For example this was created in the current version of APub:

[garrettm30]

On 11/2/2021 at 7:55 AM, fde101 said:

While I too would like to see strong support for color and variable fonts, there are many other things missing from the Affinity apps which I would agree should have a much higher priority at the moment - footnotes/endnotes, global layers, cross-references, more vector manipulations, a dog tool...  just to name a few.

I agree with all of that, but I have to ask: a “dog tool”? At first I got a chuckle out of it, thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek companion to the existing cat tool. But then I started questioning myself: is this a serious suggestion about something of which I am ignorant? Hmm…

[fde101]

5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek companion to the existing cat tool

This.  Dogs are currently underrepresented in the Serif products, so just trying to be more fair.  😎

[fiëé]

On 11/5/2021 at 12:33 AM, fde101 said:

This.  Dogs are currently underrepresented in the Serif products, so just trying to be more fair.  😎

Did you maybe read about it on SAFEnet? Their CLI had a `cat` command that got extended by `dog` for sniffing metadata etc.

Otherwise, color fonts are nice, and it’s a pity they don’t completely work in Affinity, but I can understand if they’re not a big priority. Some only show up in black, with “Liebe Heide”, the apps even crash.

[Guest]

Just leaving this article from Google about colour gradient vector fonts in Chrome here should Serif decide to ever make colour (and variable) fonts a priority. No need to tell me that Serif doesn’t comment on future product plans, as I’m well familiar with that ever popular refrain.