[HN Gopher] Color fonts on Google Fonts
___________________________________________________________________
Color fonts on Google Fonts
Author : itsuka
Score : 276 points
Date : 2022-09-14 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (material.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (material.io)
| Jack5500 wrote:
| Google Fonts is still unlawful in Germany because it violates the
| DSGVO by leaking the IP to Google without user consent.
| zebracanevra wrote:
| That sounds like the entire internet is unlawful. How would a
| German access _any_ content outside of Germany without going
| through the tens-hundreds of intermediate routers? There 's
| nothing stopping those routers from logging IPs going through
| them.
| Jack5500 wrote:
| I'm not saying that I agree with the current situation, but
| as of now it's risk for the developer to use Google Fonts. To
| answer your question more specifically, I guess you could
| argue that it's a layer problem. Lower layers can't prevent
| "leaking" your ip with the current state of the internet,
| upper layers can and should.
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| >... as of now it's risk for the developer to use Google
| Fonts.
|
| Couldn't the developer download and host the font locally
| instead of calling back to Google's servers to load the
| font?
| teknopaul wrote:
| Yes
| zamalek wrote:
| Shared CDNs (Google Fonts, jsdelivr, etc.) provide
| absolutely no advantage in modern browsers due to privacy
| concerns. The developer should be self-hosting the font
| instead of using Google's servers irrespective of German
| law.
| cardanome wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The person claiming Google Fonts would be "illegal" in
| Germany is misinformed.
|
| It is simply considered best practice to self-host Google
| Fonts now and you are absolutely safe doing so.
|
| The basics of privacy law is basically don't violate the
| privacy of your users for no good reason. There is no
| technical justification to use a Google's third party
| service for fonts, especially as that potentially allows
| Google to track users. (You could still use Google's
| hosting if you were to get prior user consent though.
| Just have a fallback font. That wouldn't be worth it
| though.)
|
| So yes, you can use third party services and CDNs on your
| website but it needs to be either technically necessary
| or you need for user consent beforehand.
| Jack5500 wrote:
| Just to make sure, I didn't say illegal, just unlawful. I
| agree with everything else you said.
| Archelaos wrote:
| To further contextualise the judgement: This was a trial
| before a medium level district court (Landgericht). So
| there has not yet been any landmark court decisions on
| this specific issue in Germany.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Is caring about performance a good enough justification?
| Chances are most popular Google Fonts are already cached
| in your browser.
| 542458 wrote:
| Cross-site caching doesn't exist in any modern browser
| (IIRC each site gets it's own separate cache) because it
| enables all sorts of tracking and leaks browsing history.
| 542458 wrote:
| Is that actually the test? That still sounds like it would
| make every third-party CDN (Cloudflare, Akami, etc) illegal
| - a CDN isn't "necessary" and logs IP addresses all over
| the place. I can't help but feel that the situation is much
| more complicated and nuanced than the original comment in
| this thread is making it sound.
| mminer237 wrote:
| No, that's actually what the law says: https://rewis.io/u
| rteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
|
| So far, the courts have only selectively enforced it
| against Google, but any website which is controlled by an
| American entity, hosted by an American entity, or which
| embeds content controlled by or hosted in the US is de
| jure illegal under GDPR because it means an American
| court could theoretically get a warrant for EU citizens'
| IP addresses.
| jhugo wrote:
| Do you have a source that backs up your interpretation of
| the situation? IP addresses are "leaked" (I think that's a
| really shitty term in this context tbh) to every single
| thing you communicate with, or via, on the Internet, and
| most of those things are operated by third parties.
|
| If "necessary" or "unavoidable" is the test, then it gets
| really murky -- is it really necessary for your ISP to buy
| wholesale IP transit from another ISP when they could build
| out their own infra instead? It's entirely avoidable for
| them to peer at IXes for more economical / efficient
| routing -- and those IXes have switches and routers
| operated by third parties which can see your traffic -- so
| is it illegal for them to offload your traffic there as
| well?
| Jack5500 wrote:
| Hi, yes there are several sources:
|
| https://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-muenchen-
| einbindung-vo...
|
| https://t3n.de/news/google-fonts-illegal-urteil-
| dsgvo-144769...
|
| https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000138472819/datenschut
| zan...
|
| All these sources lead back to this verdict:
|
| https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-174932
| 0/
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The issue isn't the existence of intermediary routing, it's
| the export of data outside the EU by an EU site.
|
| A German resident that wants to access Google or any other US
| site is fine. The packets are allowed to exit the EU _because
| that 's what they asked for_.
|
| Using Google Fonts means that your EU users have to access
| Google, a US company, in order to read your site. Most
| browsers are configured to do this automatically and opting-
| out of that would be time-consuming and break the whole web.
| And using Google Fonts gives Google the unprecedented ability
| to snoop on third-party sites. _Yes_ , they have promised not
| to do this, but their host government has also promised to
| break Google's promise for them.
|
| Taking that same logic and applying it to intermediary
| routing, the only time in which you'd have a GDPR export case
| is if you tried to access an EU website and your traffic was
| rerouted into the US or China. Which actually happens way
| more often than it should.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| >using Google Fonts gives Google the unprecedented ability
| to snoop on third-party sites
|
| What 'snooping' is happening during a CSS import?
| LtWorf wrote:
| The point is: Do not use CDNs
| adzm wrote:
| Caching does not even work like it used to with a cdn so
| self hosting things like fonts is preferable in general.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| What has changed?
| o_m wrote:
| Domains can't share the browser cache of a an external
| resource. It was a privacy risk, because it could be used
| to track users across the web.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It still is used to track users across the web.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| You can still use the fonts if you host them on your own site
| instead of making the browser load them from Google.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| This. Just don't pull them directly from Google but instead
| host them yourself.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Why don't you download and self-host the Google fonts?
| captainmuon wrote:
| For the longest time I thought that was not allowed, and I'm
| more worried about copyright violations (civil suit) than
| GDPR violations (criminal law, but I can't imagine a
| persecutor takes the time to look at my tiny websites. Here
| there is a saying "where there is no plaintiff there is no
| judge").
| cardanome wrote:
| There is no problem with self-hosting Google Fonts, the
| license allows that.
|
| I have don't so for multiple bigger customers, the law
| departments were fine with that.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Yeah but that is really debateable. What most people do is just
| put really broad terms in their data protection declaration. I
| think there have been a couple "Abmahnungen" but this was never
| really tested in court, right?
|
| Personally, I think hotlinking should not be considered leaking
| of PII. Setting a link should not imply endorsement, and
| embedding an image or an iframe should not create a derived
| work. The website just gives instructions to the user's
| browser. I could change the font myself or open another window
| with the embedded image next to the website, it is merely a
| convenience. But lawmakers try to put everything in the mold of
| yesterdays technologies, which is why we cannot have nice
| things.
|
| Now, how to deal with the fact that Google does get your IP
| and/or can identify you with cookies? Just ban profiling. It's
| not so hard.
| Jack5500 wrote:
| It was tested in court. See here:
|
| https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
|
| Therefor selfhosting a Google Font is the way if you still
| want to use them.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Using the hosted Google Fonts is, downloading and hosting
| yourself isn't.
| distantsounds wrote:
| ah, Clipart has found a new home!
| VikingCoder wrote:
| In the future, there are no fonts. We will just send and receive
| streams of strokes.
|
| And then people who need it will use OCR to translate into text.
| Which won't always work very well.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| Only the arabic ones look decent. The latin ones remind me of
| word cliparts.
| morley wrote:
| Design is highly contextual, so I think it'll depend a lot on
| how they're used. These fonts seem a lot more polished than
| what you would find in old-school clip art packs. I can imagine
| some interesting use cases for these.
|
| And even if these fonts don't hit, people will make more!
| mdrzn wrote:
| They really do look like WordArt and ClipArt from 2003, maybe
| it's the color choices?
| smoe wrote:
| To me it's is not necessarily just the colors, but that with
| the Arabic script the new features are applied in a more
| tasteful, subtle way. Whereas the latin examples seem more
| like showing off what you could do, but probably shouldn't.
| rikroots wrote:
| I've posted this link before (as a ShowHN) - this is my attempt
| to "replicate" color fonts using my JS canvas library. Getting
| the effects to be both responsive and amenable to user
| accessibility choices, while also including ways for developers
| to adapt the effects via CSS and/or HTML data- attributes ...
| it's frustrating work. But at least they look pretty.
| https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/snippets-006.html
| nicoburns wrote:
| The emoji ones also seem to work quite well
| netmare wrote:
| For some reason Google Fonts rendering is just awful on my
| (Windows) machines. I tried to investigate, but got nowhere. They
| seem extremely jaggy and with uneven strokes, like they were only
| tested on 4K displays. I don't have the budget to go beyond 1080
| at the moment.
|
| This has made me extremely averse to them, to the point where I
| simply avoid sites using them.
|
| And now they add color...
| its_bbq wrote:
| These are all vector fonts, I wonder if they'll work better for
| you
| raphlinus wrote:
| Can you send me some screenshots? Very possibly you have some
| ClearType parameters set wrong on your system. We absolutely do
| test on 1080p (though I admit my work machines are all
| retina/4k at this point).
| kuschku wrote:
| The maximum size at which 1080p (2K) works is 23".
|
| The maximum size at which 1440p works is 30".
|
| The maximum size at which 2160p (4K) works is 40".
|
| If you're using a larger size than the ones given above for a
| given resolution, you will have less than 96dpi, leading to
| fonts that break or become too thin, and icons that will be
| less recognizable.
|
| ________________________
|
| P.S.: The same can be said for colors. While any CRT in the 90s
| but even early LCDs like the Fujitsu SIEMENS P17-2 from 2004
| (now 30EUR on eBay) gets 100% sRGB, full 8-bit colors at
| exactly 96dpi, many gaming monitors don't even manage this
| today. There are still gaming monitors, 1080p at 30" or even
| 32" using 6-bit panels with FRC that barely hit 70% sRGB on
| sale today.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > With the ability to add variable axes too, the possibilities
| for customizing a COLRv1 font are literally infinite!
|
| Is it literally infinite, or is it a very large number? As far as
| I understand it, variable fonts are defined by ranges of finite
| length, and all CSS color spaces I know of are finite too. I'm
| being roughly a little pedantic, but mostly just wondering why
| they wrote it this way, and if I'm missing something. Big fans of
| Rob Lowe maybe?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| This makes me feel old. I'm glad that the option is available for
| people that want and enjoy this kind of design, but for my part
| I'll probably disable this feature and continue to block custom
| fonts.
|
| Still, it's interesting to see that there's still room for
| innovation in the font space, even if I'm not in the target
| demographic.
| mfwit wrote:
| Wordart in 2022.
| bogwog wrote:
| Next up is sound and interactivity in emojis, including a custom
| emoji scripting language and _emoji platform_ , and then the
| inevitable "DOOM ported to emoji" projects.
|
| And of course, web browsers and text rendering become
| increasingly more complex and expensive to build/maintain because
| Google single-handedly decided it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Browsers are already at the level of complexity of operating
| systems.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Related, EmojiCode (https://www.emojicode.org)
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Emojis have had colors for over 20 years so this is a terrible
| strawman you've fabricated
| bogwog wrote:
| Did you read the post? This is a new spec called COLRv1 which
| adds a bunch of complex rendering features to do what is
| effectively word art.
|
| Why does this need to be a new spec? Nobody is going to use
| it for body text. If someone wants those ugly 3D titles, they
| could use SVG or Canvas.
|
| One of the examples in the OP was colored arabic text for
| education. That's an extremely narrow use case which could be
| entirely supported with custom rendering via SVG, Canvas,
| WebGL, etc.
|
| This isn't the end of the world or anything, but it's
| annoying and frustrating to see as someone who thinks there
| should be more browsers and operating systems than the ones
| Google makes.
| aembleton wrote:
| > they could use SVG or Canvas
|
| They could but then it would be less accessible for screen
| readers or bots that want to scrape text from a web page
| for indexing or anything else. Your user agent can also
| determine if rendering those "ugly 3D titles" is the right
| thing to do or not, so you could have a plugin that stops
| them from being rendered.
|
| > there should be more browsers and operating systems than
| the ones Google makes
|
| These fonts work fine in Firefox.
| bogwog wrote:
| > They could but then it would be less accessible for
| screen readers or bots that want to scrape text from a
| web page for indexing or anything else.
|
| Screen readers can read SVG, and ARIA exists for adding
| accessibility to things like Canvas or WebGL (see:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...).
|
| > These fonts work fine in Firefox.
|
| They in fact do not work at all in Firefox (or any other
| browser besides Chrome/Edge). If you go to
| fonts.google.com, they work because that page uses a
| custom renderer for them.
|
| See the duck demo here (need to scroll down):
| https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/09/updates-to-
| emoji-n...
|
| The duck is invisible on Safari on my iPhone and in
| Firefox (104.0.1) on my desktop
| magicalist wrote:
| > _They in fact do not work at all in Firefox_
|
| as noted by jfk13 below, you have to enable
| `gfx.font_rendering.colr_v1.enabled` in about:config
| bobajeff wrote:
| This is just an extension of the ISO Open Font Format
| (Opentype). I think it's great because it's so far the only
| standard way to specify color needed to render emojis.
| manmal wrote:
| True Type fonts have been Turing complete for a while. You'd
| need to implement a small TT OS first, of course.
| dom111 wrote:
| > DOOM ported to emoji
|
| Makes me think of Fontemon:
|
| https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html#player
|
| https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
|
| Perhaps combining this COLRv1 spec and the prior art it's
| doable today!
|
| https://github.com/mmulet/font-game-engine
| miohtama wrote:
| While the parenrt is an ironic comment, color fonts were a
| staple of computer graphics design during 90s and palettized
| graphics like VGA 320x200x256 mode. The art was lost with
| TrueType and now it is coming back. People who have used Deluxe
| Paint Animator remember this.
| pradn wrote:
| After seeing the beautiful new Arabic fonts in this post, I
| can't go back to being happy with just simple text for the web.
| We're still so far from the beauty of calligraphy and even old
| metal typefaces, with their ligatures and all. We have to dream
| bigger.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Cool, the examples do not look that great, but I can see the
| potential. Why material is poorly weighed is still a mystery
| though. As in this post.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I'm both excited and scared by this development for the web.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Even if you've never heard of "color fonts," you probably use
| them everyday
|
| "every day". as in "each day". The word "everyday" is an
| adjective.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Why can't it be an adverb too?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If Google uses it as a noun, it is a noun.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| So is this statement linguistic prescriptivism, or
| descriptivism?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Prescriptivism is "Invalid syntax on line 32, column 14:
| 'everyday' is an adjective".
|
| Descriptivism is "shush, if people are using it this way
| then it's correct".
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| It's being used as an adverb to mean "daily"
| yaddaor wrote:
| Would it work as "every day"?
| lalaithion wrote:
| Yes, "every day" and "everyday" have not-quite-the-same
| meaning.
| WiggleGuy wrote:
| I think it works both ways?
| kadoban wrote:
| Not really, no. It is clearly wrong, most people wouldn't
| notice though. It's about the same level of wrongness as
| "alot".
| Karellen wrote:
| > It is clearly wrong, most people wouldn't notice though.
|
| That seems like a contradiction. If it were clearly wrong,
| most people _would_ notice. The fact that they don 't
| surely implies that it isn't very clear.
| samatman wrote:
| Alot is in the process of joining along and around. No big
| deal.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| If people don't notice it's "wrong" then it's correct.
| Language is defined by its speakers, not language
| pedantics, and always changes and evolves.
| kadoban wrote:
| _Most_ people don't notice. There still are rules
| especially for grammar.
|
| It's not something I would bring up in a forum, absent
| context or someone asking about it, but I'd definitely
| correct it in formal writing.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I'd say there are _expectations_ , rather than _rules_.
| If you know your audience is likely to care about these
| sort of things then it 's indeed a good idea to correct
| them, and it's usually best to be conservative in formal
| writing. But that doesn't really mean there are "rules"
| which cover any and all usage of the English language.
|
| Joining words to one compound word is pretty much _the_
| example of language evolution.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I'm wrong alot.
| silent_cal wrote:
| You are very smart
| [deleted]
| simondotau wrote:
| On a vaguely related note, I recall that classic Macintosh,
| sometime in the 1990s, had (possibly unofficial and/or hackish)
| operating system support for colour bitmap fonts. But I can't
| find any reference to this on Wikipedia or Google searches.
|
| I wonder if anyone else remembers this; perhaps there's an
| opportunity to document/archive something about typography which
| might otherwise get forgotten.
| bonaldi wrote:
| I think you're thinking of the Amiga, which had support for
| ColorFonts - the Kara collection was made famous by Deluxe
| Paint
| simondotau wrote:
| In this instance I'm definitely talking about Macintosh.
| LocalH wrote:
| Even there, colorfont support was not part of the OS until
| 2.0 (or maybe 2.1, can't remember). In the 1.x days you had
| to load the ColorFont wedge before you could use them
| traverseda wrote:
| What's up with svg fonts? I suppose this is a binary format, and
| presumably smaller and faster to parse than compressed SVG fonts,
| but I admit I'm a bit surprised that this isn't an improvement to
| an existing SVG font ecosystem and is instead it's own thing.
|
| It seems that if this was legitimately useful (instead of just
| one more thing competitors are obligated to spend money on
| implementing) we'd have seen SVG fonts used for it already.
| nightpool wrote:
| Nobody wants to be responsible for introducing the
| security/performance nightmare that is SVG fonts into their
| codebase. SVG is too big and too unwieldy and does too much to
| make a good performant font rendering impl. Crucially, OpenType
| fonts already have their own custom vector format that
| authoring tools and renderers are used to working with, so this
| is a form of colored font support that builds on existing font
| principles instead of stapling an entire SVG renderer inside of
| it.
| CharlesW wrote:
| SVG fonts are OpenType fonts, and my understanding is that new-
| ish support for SVG tables in OpenType fonts is what enables
| this.
|
| https://color.typekit.com/
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/sv...
|
| https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/ot-svg-color-fonts.html
|
| "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".
|
| OpenType-SVG fonts allow text to be shown with these graphic
| qualities, while still allowing it to be edited, indexed, or
| searched. They may also contain OpenType features that allow
| glyph substitution or alternate glyph styles."
| gardaani wrote:
| SVG Fonts have never had good support in web browsers. SVG-in-
| OpenType fonts has some support, for instance in Firefox.
|
| Google Chrome teams refuses to implement SVG-in-OT. Instead,
| they wanted to implemented their COLRv1.
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| the Mozilla position on COLRv1 is "Provides comparable design
| capabilities to OpenType-SVG, but in a more compact and
| lightweight form that integrates better into font rendering
| pipelines. Has the potential to supersede OpenType-SVG fonts
| in web use."
|
| So this seems like a good thing overall. Note that Firefox
| doesn't support it at this time.
| jfoster wrote:
| > the Mozilla position on...
|
| Where does Mozilla's revenue come from? Are they an
| impartial 3rd party?
| jfk13 wrote:
| There's support in Firefox Nightly, actually, if you enable
| the setting 'gfx.font_rendering.colr_v1.enabled' in
| about:config.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Ah cool, I missed that!
| dheera wrote:
| Oh fantastic, just after I thought we were done with ugly
| gradients everywhere, we've re-invented Microsoft WordArt.
| Kukumber wrote:
| When gamedevs enhance everyone's life
| teknopaul wrote:
| I can imagine the only people excited about this are G O o g L E
| mastax wrote:
| Interesting that so many of the initial fonts are Arabic. They
| look beautiful, though.
| s1mon wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no support for COLRv1 fonts on Safari
| (desktop or mobile).[0] There is support for COLRv0, so hopefully
| this will come to Safari/Webkit at some point.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr-v1
|
| [1] https://www.lambdatest.com/web-technologies/colr
| alwillis wrote:
| WebKit's position: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
| dev/2021-March/031...
| onion2k wrote:
| _Unfortunately there is no support for COLRv1 fonts on Safari
| (desktop or mobile)._
|
| The expectation that every user get's exactly the same
| experience regardless of what browser they're using has held
| the development of great user experiences on the web back for
| about two decades now. There's no reason why you shouldn't
| deliver a better experience for some users if their browser is
| more capable.
|
| Design a working minimal app. It'll probably be close to a
| plain HTML and CSS site that's rendered on a server. Then add
| in things that make it nicer to use while checking that the
| browser supports that feature so you don't break anything if it
| doesn't. Build up to a really nice experience. _Progressively
| enhance_ the usr experience. This is literally how websites
| were built 20 years ago, but then developers got lazy and only
| wrote apps for the lowest common denominator, which meant any
| new features in browsers rarely good used, and at the same time
| slightly unusual browsers like Lynx got abandoned entirely. It
| really annoys me.
| msoad wrote:
| The gradient should look amazing for Chinese/Japanese/Korean
| stroke-based scripts. I can't wait to see them being developed.
|
| The Arabic scripts look amazing! Gradient support is bigger than
| color support imo
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| The Arabic scripts are breathtaking but I had some difficulty
| discerning the Reem Kufi examples. It might be just me, but
| I've never seen the right+left connected ` drawn that way in
| Kufi scripts. It seems both alien and a poor match for the rest
| of the characters in the Reem Kufi fonts - I first thought it
| was a ligature error!
| khaled wrote:
| Reem Kufi designer here, that is the original form of ` in
| Arabic and the only form used in manuscript Kufi. Kufi-
| inspired typefaces often use the more familiar form from
| later calligraphic styles. Reem Kufi has an alternate form as
| well, but it is not the default.
| masswerk wrote:
| I quite disliked the Latin fonts at first sight, but I like the
| Arabic ones just as much as I dislike the former. An occasion
| to contemplate that what may be not that great in the context
| of Western culture may be still a great thing and useful for
| another one.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Seeing the Arabic script and knowing the technology behind it
| that makes it possible to render is one of those rare "wow"
| moments for me.
| wdb wrote:
| No word about the creative tools supporting this format?
| rikroots wrote:
| This site gives an overview of support for color fonts beyond
| the browser - https://www.colorfonts.wtf/
| gnicholas wrote:
| Does anyone here know how to connect with the folks working on
| this at Google (or elsewhere)? My work focuses on the
| intersection of color and text, so I would be interested to know
| who else is thinking about these topics. (Contact is in profile.)
| aspyct wrote:
| I love the retro vibe of their isometric "Nabla" font :D
| hdesh wrote:
| Perhaps a naive question, as I don't understand this domain very
| well. How are these fonts different than, say just changing the
| color of the text?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Colors (and gradients) per-stroke rather than per-glyph.
| (Coloring all of an "A" versus the three or more strokes that
| make an "A", for instance.)
|
| The most obvious examples are emoji which may need hundreds of
| strokes in many colors to be properly colored as we see them in
| most places (that aren't HN). Many emoji were rendered as
| bitmap images on many platforms to be able to get the colors
| correct prior to font support for color fonts.
| hnarn wrote:
| Did you click the link and note the headline saying "What's so
| special about the COLRv1 font format?" before asking this
| question?
| nerdponx wrote:
| You can do something like building a brand logo and embedding
| it in webpages and documents as actual text, in rather than an
| image.
| jfoster wrote:
| If you did that, what's the advantage? Instead of loading an
| image file, it loads a font file, which seems a lot like an
| image file when used that way.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Text is easier for screen readers to read, easier for
| search engines to parse, easier for control-F to find,
| easier to copy and paste. Text is a better format for text,
| and this allows for companies to embed their logotype
| design as text with a specific font as opposed to
| incentivizing them to use an image.
| jfoster wrote:
| Screenreader: image "alt" tag should be equivalent,
| shouldn't it? Arguably better, because the intent of it
| is more widely understood.
|
| Search engine parsing: image "alt" tag should be
| equivalent again.
|
| Copy-Paste: Arguably not better with a font. A raster
| image will be the same regardless of where you copy-paste
| it. A logo implemented with a font will only look the
| same when copy-pasting between applications that are
| aware of that font. If every company creates their own
| font-logo, it will just break copy-paste everywhere
| except their domain.
| lalaithion wrote:
| WCAG specifically asks designers to avoid text in images
| because they're not equivalent.
|
| If I embed an image in some text, like `foo <img
| alt="bar"> baz` then I doubt any search engine can find
| this for the search query `"foo bar baz"`.
|
| I would like to copy and past text-like things as text,
| without having to copy and paste images. When I want to
| copy and paste text, I rarely care about matching exact
| styles. In cases where I want the exact style, I can just
| screenshot.
| rsoto wrote:
| They're multi-color. For example, you could have a font with a
| 3D-effect, its shadow and lighting could be different from the
| actual block. Look at the first image of the post to see what I
| mean, the big "Color Fonts" text.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Hm. I think it may now be possible to encode an entire NFT
| collection in a font.
|
| Anyway, hopefully Firefox will add support for COLRv1, at least
| for some platforms. FreeType has it apparently.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| I've heard google is bringing the <blink> tag back next!
| gfxgirl wrote:
| AFAIK it was Apple that first added color to fonts in a modern
| OS. The fonts render in Safari and Firefox. Google is just
| publishing some fonts.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Hard to argue that having this functionality in the type itself
| is better than having to do so in images. It has big advantages
| over SVGs, as well. I can copy styled text, for example.
|
| So it's not like this would empower people to do ugly web
| design that they couldn't already do.
|
| Per your point, I prefer CSS animations to having a blink tag,
| and people have managed to avoid using those too much the last
| 20 years.
| ape4 wrote:
| Will this be abused like the <marquee> tag and animated gifs.
| blueblob wrote:
| With the ability to add parameters to fonts, I wonder how long it
| will be until we have Turing Complete fonts.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| TrueType already has a Turing-complete bytecode.
| Diris wrote:
| Font hinting is already turing complete[0]. (I learned about
| the in this[1] iceberg meme)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType#Hinting_language
|
| [1] https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html
|
| "So this is pretty cool, but it turns out that the contextual
| substitution lookup type is really powerful. This is because
| the table that it references can be itself, which means it can
| be recursive."
|
| [...]
|
| "So thats a pretty powerful virtual machine. I think the above
| is sufficient to prove Turing complete-ness."
| raphlinus wrote:
| Behdad had this result earlier:
| https://twitter.com/behdadesfahbod/status/958065026262183936
| gorkish wrote:
| Postscript fonts? Fully programmable font glyphs in the 80's.
| Little used, but very fun. I recall a typewriter font that
| would vary the glyphs position, weight and edges a bit to
| simulate coming from a manual typewriter.
|
| One could, if so inclined, build a complete COLRv1 font parser
| in PostScript.
| one-more-minute wrote:
| A nice example, not currently available on Google fonts AFAICT,
| is 'Gilbert': https://www.typewithpride.com
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| How is it "nice"? It's almost unreadable.
| jtolmar wrote:
| It's clearly a title font. If someone uses that as a body
| font, it's hopefully a shitpost.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| In fact, its design choice is questionable even as a title
| font. Normally the text color will be chosen so that it has
| enough contrast compared to the background. With color
| fonts you can't always change the text color, but you can
| still change the background. Gilbert however contains _all_
| hues in a single glyph, so some part of each glyph is
| always going to be hard to distinguish from the background
| without much care.
| anvic wrote:
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| There is also a Hangul adaptation of Gilbert called Gilbeot
| [1]. It also has an interesting feature that censors words that
| discriminate LGBT people (akin to Sans Bullshit Sans). I do
| have a feeling that they are clearly decorative and yet still
| being overused for non-heading text, maybe this is a major
| problem with many color fonts.
|
| [1] https://rainbowfoundation.co.kr/gilbeot
| bool3max wrote:
| Looks extremely unreadable and ugly. Guess that's what happens
| when you're tasked with creating a font based on the "rainbow
| flag".
| derbOac wrote:
| That is a beautiful font. Is it distributed in the same format
| as what's discussed in the material.io post (COLRv1)? It's
| still a good example of what's possible; I'm just curious.
| [deleted]
| alberth wrote:
| Off topic: why does Google use "material.io" as a domain to
| publish too?
| dustinmoris wrote:
| malshe wrote:
| There are a few nice color fonts I have used in the past. One of
| my favorite is Raleway Color Semibold by Vidhunnan Murugan:
| https://typewithraleway.firebaseapp.com
| nerdponx wrote:
| Unfortunately this webpage is completely broken on iPhone.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Funny that the site forces to be view on a desktop.
| aendruk wrote:
| Sad, all I see on that page is: 3E A DESIGNER!
| E YOUR DESKTOP/LAPTO
|
| Seems pretty misguided.
| nokeya wrote:
| Reminds me WordArt from MS Office
| b3nji wrote:
| Nice, Word Art is back!
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| Never thought I'd see WordArt coming back 20 years later but here
| we are.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| I thought you were going to say 30 years later. Amiga had color
| fonts
| amelius wrote:
| Add this to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about
| fonts.
| simondotau wrote:
| Anything more complicated than ASCII text in a single monospace
| font is literally impossible to implement and nobody should
| ever attempt it.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Amazing to see people doing such important work. As an engineer I
| should really step aside and let these guys run the internet.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's almost like the font package and rendering are the
| equivalent of "The New Print Shop" but much better.
| hoseja wrote:
| Arab calligraphy is really pretty.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| An interesting idea for a color font is a terminal font
| automatically supporting terminal colors (by the terminal escape
| characters). Sometimes you just pipe your output somewhere which
| isn't a real terminal, and having color support would be nice if
| all you needed to do was change fonts.
| xrd wrote:
| I'm surprised at how fun this article is, and how gorgeous fonts
| can look. And, it makes me, at least for a few seconds, want to
| switch back to Chrome from Firefox.
| pjerem wrote:
| It works perfectly on Firefox :)
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nabla
| Nadya wrote:
| Only on that specific page because it uses a custom renderer.
| Try to place the font on another web page and view it in
| Firefox.
| seaal wrote:
| Also working perfectly for me on Firefox, once I remembered
| to turn off LocalCDN.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| I'm wondering if/how my coding experience could be enhanced with
| this in my code editor.
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