Colour fonts, FontLab Pad and Affinity Designer

[William Overington]

This morning I was looking at a facility for printing A0 posters.

I decided to try uploading an A0 document to have a look at a preview.

I remembered that many years ago, as a learning experience, I had produced A0test.PDF using PagePlus on the then computer here and uploaded it to the web.

So I went to the web page from which I knew it to be linked.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/library.htm

and searched for A0 on the page.

I was surprised to find 11 uses.

So I decided to look at what they were.

I found the following file.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/view_from_an_art_gallery_foyer_a0.pdf

Going up the page I found that this link was part of some notes from Thursday 28 August 2014.

It seems that I used FontLab Pad to display a glyph from a colour font that I had made, the glyph being a picture that included a layer that had semi-transparent colour.

The key part of all of this that is important here in this thread is that FontLab Pad was used to export a PDF document that displayed a colour font in vector form as a collection of layers and that it had been possible to import that PDF document into PagePlus and enlarge the image.

So I am wondering if using a colour font in FontLab Pad and exporting a PDF from FontLab Pad and then inporting the PDF into Affinity Publisher will produce a workaround whereby colour fonts can be used in Affinity Designer together with other features of Affinity Designer such as the shape tools to produce artwork and the result exported as a vector PDF document from which high quality prints can be produced.

https://www.fontlab.com/fontlab-pad/

William