Colored/decorative/graphic fonts showing only in swatch color

[TomJr]

I have several decorative Opentype fonts (from Creative Fabrica) that I am trying to use in Affinity Designer and Publisher. 

When trying to enter a line of text (both in Frame Text and Artistic Text), the resulting text only show up in the swatch color selected. Even trying "no color" makes it, well, no color.

I am attaching a sample of the results from Designer and Adobe Illustrator. This behavior is exhibited on all the Affinity apps.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[walt.farrell]

What fonts, specifically?

In general "Color" fonts are not supported in the Affinity applications, but some may be depending on exactly what functions they use.

[TomJr]

Didn't know the specific font mattered, but here they are, all from Creative Fabrica (btw, all Opentype). Not sure I should be attaching any of them for legal reasons, but I am attaching the one I show in my original post.

Alphabet Blocks CG
Back to School
Back to School Set
Back to School Set 2
Back to School Set 3
Back to School Set 4
Back to School Set 5

BackToSchoolSet3Regular.otf

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, TomJr said:

Not sure I should be attaching any of them for legal reasons, but I am attaching the one I show in my original post.

No, you shouldn't. 

Thanks for the list.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[TomJr]

8 minutes ago, lacerto said:

Affinity apps have actually pretty decent support for color fonts but not for OpenType-SVG, for which it only shows fallback (black&white) glyphs.

So that's what they are? Interesting. I hope that changes, so for now I have to use Adobe for this particular project.

Thanks.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[TomJr]

41 minutes ago, lacerto said:

Yes, Adobe is good for that, but they also have their preferred formats!

That is also true, but for this particular project, I will have to go Adobe. Really hoping that I can detach from them permanently.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[kenmcd]

6 hours ago, TomJr said:

Back to School Set 3

Affinity does support OpenType COLRv0 fonts.
And if an OpenType SVG font is vectors and not simply images, they may be converted.
COLRv0 does not support certain features (e.g. gradients, blending, etc.)
But for some fonts that is fine.

First I converted the OTF to TTF.
Then I used nanoemoji to convert it to COLRv0.
The image below is a PNG exported from APub v2.5.3 (PDF also works).

There does appear to be some differences.
But I cannot use Color-SVG which would be needed to compare.
So give it a try yourself.
I did change the font name so you can have them both installed at the same time.
It is listed as: Back To School Set 3 COLR
BackToSchoolSet3COLR-Regular.zip

[TomJr]

@kenmcd Hey, that's great!

Now, how did you convert to TTF?

[TomJr]

Yeah, as long as I have designer clients that use it, I'm still stuck. But on projects that originate in-house, Affinity is the way I go.

[kenmcd]

27 minutes ago, TomJr said:

@kenmcd Hey, that's great!

Now, how did you convert to TTF?

This time I used FoundryTools-CLI (which is basically using fonttools).
https://ftcli.github.io/FoundryTools-CLI/commands/ftcli_converter.html#ftcli-converter-otf2ttf

nanoemoji has an issue with OTF fonts - so I just convert them to TTF first.

[TomJr]

@kenmcd thanks, I'll give it a shot!

[Don Johnson]

Adobe Illustrator already has this capability, when will Affinity Designer implement it?  Maybe you could get ahead of CorelDraw 25, who also does NOT support color vector fonts.

[kenmcd]

1 hour ago, Don Johnson said:

Adobe Illustrator already has this capability, when will Affinity Designer implement it?  Maybe you could get ahead of CorelDraw 25, who also does NOT support color vector fonts.

COLRv0 fonts are vector fonts.

Color-SVG fonts may or may not be just vector (depends on the SVGs inside)
Most are essentially bitmap fonts (because the SVG is just an image).

 

[Yves Michel]

Hello,

I was wondering when Affinity will support COLRv1 fonts. I've created my first one using gradients with Fontlab 8.2 and would like to use it with Affinity. It works in MS Word.