OpenType-SVG is a font format in which an OpenType font has all or just some of its glyphs represented as SVG (scalable vector graphics) artwork. This allows the display of multiple colors and gradients in a single glyph. Because of these features, we also refer to OpenType-SVG fonts as “color fonts”.
Support so far: Firefox 26+, Edge 38+
But good news, it’s progressive enhancement friendly. The Typekit announcement page:
In browsers that lack color font support, they will fall back to regular monochrome glyphs.
So, they are usable right now. It opens up such fun doors I imagine there will be plenty of fonts coming out that take advantage of it. I’d also imagine non-supporting browsers will be wanting to get on the fun-train.
Apparently, there is a future for color bitmaps fonts, too.
Hey Chris,
I can see some ‘Webdings colour fonts’ arriving very shortly. I’ll bet £ 20.
Kind regards,
Mic
Thanks Chris for noticing color bitmap fonts too ;)
This is BIG NEWS for all the lettering lovers who’ve dreamed to make fonts that showed the original handmade, calligraphic or textured form.
And all Photoshop CC 2017 users can now create AND use their own color bitmap fonts thanks to our Fontself Maker add-on: https://learn.fontself.com/create-your-first-color-font-step-by-step-270ced3f0745
(@Mic Sumner: 2017 will be a wild year for color web fonts, for sure ;)
this is awesome, but what firefox theme are you using in that last screenshot?
I too must know this answer. For science!
From the looks I would say it’s the Firefox Developer Edition :)
I’m imagining a lot of companies using their own custom sets of emoticons built with color fonts…
Actually not much… yet. Due to the lack of a standard format, color font support across operating systems and browsers has been pretty constraining. So many companies still rely of sets of images for cross-platform emojis.
But in early 2016, most key players settled around the OpenType SVG format, which is now progressively supported (Firefox, Edge, and now Photoshop).
While we can expect a transition period during which we’ll need several color font formats, it should (hopefully) progressively converge… (remember the early days of web fonts when you needed so many font flavors? ;)
This is huge news. Yet methinks we’ll no longer be able to style font colours via CSS. Does that not introduce the limitation of have distributed font sets that do not match your design? Now what? We’ll all have to create our own custom colour fonts per project. Great!