Color font issue (random scaling of glyphs) in Word and PowerPoint

[martinplus]

Hi, I’ve made a layer colorfont (Latin Extended glyph set incl. kerning) which works well in the design apps and browsers. When I’m in Word (16.45 on Mac OS 10.15) or PowerPoint and start typing, I get strange seemingly random scaling of some glyphs (see images) very frequently. When I paste text all works well.

Does that ring any bells?

I’ve generated the font as ttf and otf, with COLR/CPAL and/or SVG, all fonts seem trigger thethe same issue in Word and PowerPoint.

Very often it does this:

Sometimes it works:

Thanks,
Martin

[GeorgSeifert]

that seems to be an Office bug. One thing you might look into is the bounding box of the default (black) glyph.

[martinplus]

(Thanks for your feedback. The (black) fall back glyph has the same bounding box as the orange and yellow layer combined, containing the base glyph and the underline element. I’m clueless what to try next.)

[GeorgSeifert]

Can you ask the question on typedrawers.com?

[rosalie (Rosalie Wagner)]

I was going through the same issue and going crazy, so I will put a comment here in case someone is looking for a fix.

When a color font contains a CPAL table, Word will re-scale glyphs in proportion to their kerning pair value. Uncheck the CPAL export and it should work fine in MS Word.

[martinplus]

That is helpful information, thanks for sharing!

[jkutilek (Jens Kutilek)]

This deserves an award for the craziest bug in a long time.

[rosalie (Rosalie Wagner)]

My bad, I actually still got the bug in MS Word (MacOS), but in a more random way.

First line made me thought there was no longer an issue (with CPAL/COLR tables, “UVA” where having different proportions). But the kerning space/V triggered the scaling again.

The good news is that deactivating kerning does the trick. The bad news is that you don’t have kerning then.

The other news is that Windows works fine! I tried all kind of strings, no issue:

So it’s a MacOS bug only.