There are two scalable color extensions.
▪COLR; initiated by Microsoft, using internal tables COLR and CPAL
▪SVG; initially proposed by Mozilla and Adobe, using a SVG table (optionally along with CPAL)
COLR (and required CPAL)
As revealed at the Microsoft Build Developer Conference in June 2013, Windows 8.1 comes with a revolutionary extension to the OpenType font standard, which introduces multi-color fonts. The technology which is both simple and powerful uses multi-layer glyphs which are in essence scalable outlines that are rendered and processed like any other character, except each layer has its own color using internal tables COLR and CPAL.
High-Logic is convinced this new technology will open new colorful doors. That is why FontCreator was the first font editor to support the new multi-color fonts extension.
The beauty of the color extension is that the fonts will continue to work like any other font on devices and systems that don’t support the extension yet. That is why it is strongly recommended to always include the base outlines for each glyph (used as fallback in case color fonts are not supported, or not wanted in a particular situation). This is currently the only color extension that works with variable fonts.
In December 2021 OpenType Specification version 1.9 was released. It includes a major improvement to COLR, known as COLRv1. It allows you to make color fonts with gradient fills, as well as more complex fills using other graphic operations, including affine transformations and various blending modes. FontCreator currently does not support COLRv1.
SVG (and optional CPAL)
This extension uses scalable vector graphics (SVG) documents. There is no visual SVG editor in FontCreator, but you can generate the SVG color format out of the COLR extension. You can also import an SVG document for each glyph.
Which one to choose?
With the rise of COLRv1 the color font war is most likely won by Microsoft, so we recommend to use COLR. You can then also automatically export to SVG without any additional design efforts. COLR is supported by all major web browsers, and more and more Windows software like Word, and paint.net.
Most Adobe software support OpenType SVG color fonts, but the SVG extension is not supported in Chromium-based browsers, like Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi, and there are no plans to support it.
Support for Color font extensions
Not all software and web browsers support the scalable color extensions. We have gathered a more complete list in our online color tutorial:
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator/tutorials
