Drop the font file in the Terminal window and hit return. Open the Terminal and type ttx if you are on Mac OS and have fonttools installed. Just generate a otf or ttf with the font editor of your choice. To do so I used the very helpful fonttools by Just van Rossum. You can also modify the svg table of a compiled font or insert your own if it does not have any yet. Print "Done with the Devision" For RoboChrome you will need to split your glyph into several. You will need a separate version of your base-glyph for every color, which can also be done with a scipt if you have all of your outlines in layers. In case you don’t want to use TransType you might have a look at the very powerful RoboFont extension by Jens Kutílek called RoboChrome. The preview of your colorfont in TransType. You will get a folder with all colorfont versions. Select the newly added font in the collection and export it as OpenType (ttf). You get a preview window where you can assign a rgba value for each ufo and then hit OK. In the Effect menu click ‘Overlay Fonts …’. Just drop your ufos in the main window and select the ones you want to combine. Once I had all my separate ufos I loaded them into TransType from FontLab. NewFont.save(destDir = path +"_%s" % layer +".ufo") I used a little python script to safe them in the same place as the main file: f = CurrentFont() When you are done drawing your outlines you will need to safe a ufo for every layer / color. The outlines of the separate layers and their combination Define the colors you want to see in the Layer Preview Adjust the colors to your liking in the Inspector since they are used for the preview. You can also just increase the size of the thumbnails in the font window. With the very handy Layer Preview extension you can preview all Layers overlapping. Either draw in the separate layers right away or just copy the outlines into the respective layer after you’ve drawn them in the foreground layer. In a new font I added as many new layers as the amount of colors I wanted to have in the final font. RoboFont is the editor of my choice, since it is highly customizable and you can build your own extensions with python. There are several options like RoboFont and Glyphs (both Mac only), FontLab and the free FontForge. In order to make your own you will need a font editor. There might be other ways but this is how I managed to build colorful OpenType fonts. I am not a font technician or a web developer just very curious about this new developments. The possibility to animate the svgs is an interesting addition and will surely be used in interesting (and very annoying) ways. With the development of high resolution screens vectors also seem to be a better solution than pixels. Of course this depends on the complexity of your typeface but svgs should usually result in a smaller file size than pngs. The basic idea is to store the colored glyphs as svgs in the OpenType font. Upon its proposal it was discussed by a W3C community group and published as a stable document. To me the Adobe/Mozilla way looks the most intriguing. Adam Twardoch compares all proposed solutions in great detail on the FontLab blog. As of this writing there are several different ways to implement this. It took some emojis until the demand for multi-colored fonts was big enough to develop additional tables to store this information within OpenType fonts. Multiplying does not sound like an elegant solution and it is a constant source of errors. Analog to letterpress the content needs to be doubled and superimposed to have more than one color per glyph. There can be several outlines in a glyph but when the font is used to set type the assigned color applies to all outlines. Simulation of two overprinting colors resulting in a third.ĭigital font formats kept the limitation to one ‘surface’ per glyph. Using overprinting the impression of three colors can be achieved with just two colors. This has been done beautifully and pictures of some magnificent examples are available online. More than one color per letter required separate fonts for the differently colored parts and a new print run for every color. When printing with wood or lead type the limitation to one color per glyph is inherent (if you don’t count random gradients). Like it happened with many other techniques before, it took some time for digital type to overcome the constraints of the old technique. Getting a polychrome letter required multiplying the content for every color. Until recently having more than one color in a glyph of a vector font was technically not possible.
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