Does Affinity version 2 support colour fonts please?

[William Overington]

Does Affinity version 2 support colour fonts please?

William

 

[walt.farrell]

There have been no enhancements in font handling in V2 over what V1 provided. So, in answer to your question: only the color fonts that V1 supported would work in V2. But I have no idea what those are; only that some exist. There are discussions of this in the forums, and a search for color fonts would probably find them, with some work reading the results.

[William Overington]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

There have been no enhancements in font handling in V2 over what V1 provided. So, in answer to your question: only the color fonts that V1 supported would work in V2. But I have no idea what those are; only that some exist. There are discussions of this in the forums, and a search for color fonts would probably find them, with some work reading the results.

Thank you.

There is no colour font support in version 1.

We did have a go with a partial workaround that I found to be useful to test colour fonts and basically to play a bit, but that was all.

The workaround being that, as a colour font will also display in monochrome, it is possible to produce a design in Affinity Designer and include use of a colour font in the design. The text displays as monochrome in Affinity Designer version 1, because Affinity Designer version 1 does not support colour fonts. The design is then exported from Affinity Designer as an SVG graphic without converting the text to curves. This means that the text is exported as character codes within the SVG file. Microsoft Edge supports colour fonts. Displaying the SVG file in Microsoft Edge means that the text that is in the design is displayed using the colour font display facility of Microsoft Edge.

It is far from being a total workaround but I have found it useful for some purposes as I could then gather a Print Screen image and use that image to produce a png graphic file to include in a web page.

I hope that Affinity software will soon support colour fonts.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, William Overington said:

There is no colour font support in version 1.

There is some very limited support. But I do not know how to describe it.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

There is some very limited support. But I do not know how to describe it.

Are you perhaps thinking of being able to use sets of monochrome fonts that can be used in multiple layers, each layer monochrome in one colour, with the net effect looking as if a colour font has been used?

Such as my Galileo Lettering fonts of many years ago?

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/mosaic3.PDF

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

The basic Galileo Lettering lowercase are based on a design for capital letters that I drew on a graph plotter attached to an Elliott 803 computer in 1969.

In the early 2000s when I learned to make electronic fonts I tried to produce the same design in a TrueType font, and I succeeded.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Are you perhaps thinking of being able to use sets of monochrome fonts that can be used in multiple layers, each layer monochrome in one colour, with the net effect looking as if a colour font has been used?

I have no idea. Only that it has been discussed, and there is some limited support. It's not important enough to me for me to spend the time doing the search and reading the results.

[kenmcd]

On 1/7/2023 at 1:04 PM, William Overington said:

Are you perhaps thinking of being able to use sets of monochrome fonts that can be used in multiple layers, each layer monochrome in one colour, with the net effect looking as if a colour font has been used?

Affinity supports COLR v0 fonts on Windows (added when they added color emoji support). May also work on Mac, I do not know.

COLR v0 fonts are constructed by putting each shape/color/layer on separate characters/glyphs. There is a color palette and the layer/glyphs are assigned a color from the palette. Those component characters/layers are then stacked and presented as one multi-colored character.
So it works very similar to using layered fonts, but in one font.

FontCreator can create/edit COLR v0 color fonts (so the demo should work for you).
Windows Segoe UI Emoji is a COLR v0 color font - so you can look that.
And there other example COLR v0 fonts I posted in the other color font thread.

I could not download your PDF above, but if you have the layers already you could probably convert the font to COLR v0 and use it in Affinity.
Not a simple task. But possible.

[lacerto]