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Pixel Ambacht's multicolor font page
[Roel Nieskens]
Pixel Ambacht (The Netherlands) lists the issues multicolor fonts have to grapple with in an article written in 2014 [text below quoted verbatim from his site]: - These fonts can be huge. Even Microsoft's lightweight solution would triple the amount of glyphs needed just for a simple duo-tone font. Luckily WOFF automatically supports these new OpenType tables, and does a good job in compressing the original TTF file. WOFF2 is coming soon, which should result in even smaller files. But still, the emoji WOFF font on Firefox's emoji test page is half a megabyte large. Do we want to let our visitors download a couple of MB just to get fancy letters or icons?
- Support in different browsers. You'll have to serve up an individual font file for each technique. Today this'd mean two font files, one for IE11 on Windows 8.1, and one for Firefox. I don't think there's a way to do feature testing for this, so you'd either have to sniff user agent strings, or serve them both to each visitor. Theoretically the proposals could live together inside one file, but I haven't found any tools to do this with yet. Which version the browser would choose when it'd support them all remains to be seen.
- Colors are determined by the font maker. The color scheme is hardcoded in the font. This might not be a big problem for emoji, but if you're going to use a fancy colored font, you want it to fit the design and style of the rest of your website. One might see how Microsoft's solution could perhaps be addressed from CSS (maybe with an extension to CSS like color-layer1: red;)---but that's assuming the font shares one palette. If each character has its own set of colors, like emoji, this is going to get messy fast. And changing color of PNGs or SVGs seems nearly impossible.
- Render performance. Getting that font to show up might be CPU intensive, especially on mobile. Implementations will surely be optimized over time, but for now this Mozilla test page seems to be very slow on my PC.
- Accessibility. Color can spice up your design, and it can add meaning to text or UI elements---but only when done well. Multicolor fonts can reduce legibility of text, especially when the human using your website is color blind. There is currently no way to force the multicolor font to use its non-color fallback.
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EXTERNAL LINKS
Pixel Ambacht's multicolor font page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search
INTERNAL LINKS
Multicolor typefaces ⦿
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