Color Font is not being displayed in Affinity Designer 2 - Desktop

[Sam S - TO]

I just downloaded and installed Affinity Designer 2, with the hope that color fonts will work.

 

I downloaded this font and installed it - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/patriotic-11/. However, we I set the text to this font in Affinity Designer 2, It is showing as monochrome. 

 

Any idea why? Is there any workaround?

 

Thanks.

[firstdefence]

Color fonts are not yet supported.

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

Color fonts are not yet supported.

Until they are, it seems that the best we can do is export to SVG, view the result in a web browser (or any other app that displays the text correctly) and take a screenshot.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Sam S - TO]

@Alfred Thanks. I did what you suggested, but seems like it's not working when I export SVG and view in Web Browser. It's still monochrome. Wondering if there are any settings for the  SVG export?

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Sam S - TO said:

@Alfred Thanks. I did what you suggested, but seems like it's not working when I export SVG and view in Web Browser. It's still monochrome.

I don’t have that font, so I can’t test it here, but my guess is that it’s not an SVG font. I have several colour fonts that I can use as described, but I also have one or two that remain stubbornly monochrome.

[Sam S - TO]

@Alfred I just checked one of the fonts I used - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/patriotic-11/. It says " This product is a color font (Opentype-SVG)"

Please could you give me an example of a color font that you got working via the SVG export and open via browser.

 

 

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, Sam S - TO said:

Please could you give me an example of a color font that you got working via the SVG export and open via browser.

Playbox, the font shown in the screenshots that I posted earlier, is one of several free fonts that I have here. Ponche, one of the colour fonts that doesn’t work for me via SVG export, is described on the MyFonts website as being in SVG-TTF format, so it would seem that there’s more to this than meets the eye.

https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ponche-font-sudtipos#aboutThisFont

[firstdefence]

1 hour ago, Sam S - TO said:

@Alfred I just checked one of the fonts I used - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/patriotic-11/. It says " This product is a color font (Opentype-SVG)"

Please could you give me an example of a color font that you got working via the SVG export and open via browser.

 

 

You can quite easily make a flag font effect in Photo or Designer.

USA Flag Font.afdesign

[kenmcd]

You may be able to convert the font from SVG to COLR (which works in Affinity). Depends on the SVGs in the font. Have to see the font.

[Sam S - TO]

@Alfred Thanks for your help so far. Still no luck. I downloaded Playbox, installed it on Windows.

• I used the font in Affinity Designer --> Monochrome, then downloaded the SVG or WEBP.
• Opening the files in any web browser, and still I see Monochrome

Is there something I am missing? Is there some sort of settings during export?

AD 2:

Browser:

[Sam S - TO]

@firstdefence Complete newbie and don't know how to do it. Thanks for the file. I will give it a shot.

[Sam S - TO]

@kenmcd Complete newbie. Don't know how to convert. The font files are attached. I got it from here - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/patriotic-11/

 

Thanks.

 

Edited February 27, 2024 by Sam S - TO
removing commercial product

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, Sam S - TO said:

Is there something I am missing?

It’s probably something I’m missing! It works for me in Firefox, but I was sure I had it working in another browser, too.

P.S. I suggest that you remove the zip attachment from your post. Commercial products really shouldn’t be shared on a public forum.

[William Overington]

We experimented with using colour fonts with Affinity Designer some time ago.

An Affinity Designer design was prepared in Affinity Designer, the colour font appeared in Monochrome.

One then exported an SVG file from Affinity Designer with the option to convert text to cures turned off.

Thus the Unicode characters are listed in the SVG file, and when the SVG file was displayed using the Microsoft Edge browser, the characters were displayed in colour as the Microsoft Edge browser did the displaying.

Can anyone find the original thread about getting a colour image by this technique please?

However, that was then and this is now and I saw something recently that made me wonder if it will still work.

https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2024-February/003285.html

But I might have got it wrong.

I need to remember that the term SVG in the context of this thread might be referring to two different things.

One is an SVG file exported from Affinity Designer.

The other is that some fonts internally use SVG to implement the glyph designs within the font.

I hope this helps.

William

 

[Alfred]

38 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It works for me in Firefox, but I was sure I had it working in another browser, too.

 

15 minutes ago, William Overington said:

when the SVG file was displayed using the Microsoft Edge browser, the characters were displayed in colour

I tried it in both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer earlier today, and it appeared in monochrome in both. I then tried it in Opera, but that also failed.

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I need to remember that the term SVG in the context of this thread might be referring to two different things.

One is an SVG file exported from Affinity Designer.

The other is that some fonts internally use SVG to implement the glyph designs within the font.

 

10 hours ago, Alfred said:

Ponche, one of the colour fonts that doesn’t work for me via SVG export, is described on the MyFonts website as being in SVG-TTF format

 

[William Overington]

Here are links to threads produced a few years ago.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/128285-colour-fonts-and-affinity-products/

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/144236-some-language-independent-glyphs-for-museum-shops/

William

 

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, Sam S - TO said:

@kenmcd Complete newbie. Don't know how to convert. The font files are attached. I got it from here - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/patriotic-11/

 

Thanks.

Patriotic-71381259 (1).zip 638.18 kB · 2 downloads

Wow. This may actually be convertible to COLR. Most OpenType-SVG fonts just contain images (which cannot be converted), but this appears to have vectors - so it may be possible. We'll see.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Sam S - TO]

Thanks. I will try this out. But yet another software? - VectorStyler!

[kenmcd]

Conversion to COLR seems to be working... sort of...

This is Export to PDF from APub and then converted to an image.

I got some errors on the conversion, and that seems to be related to some of the details (the lines etc.).

Gotta go now - will check it out tomorrow.

Note: bonus side effect is all the SVGs have been dumped to a folder.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[firstdefence]

If exporting to SVG and PDF displays the font as it should why can't Affinity simply activate this in house, seems bonkers to have a colorfont font that doesn't display as it is and is actually masked out by a text fill, surely it's not that big a leap to get these fonts displayed au naturel instead of hoop jumping yet again.

[William Overington]

I asked at the OpenType mailing list and Mr Peter Constable, a top expert in these matters, kindly answered.

https://lists.aau.at/pipermail/mpeg-otspec/2024-February/003303.html

William