Export CBDT/CBLC tables

Hi everyone,

I-m working on a bitmap color font, I used the instructions on your SBIX tutorial and I managed to export the font.

  1. When using the font on Adobe Illustrator on Windows 11 the font is not working unless I add the SVG layer and export the SBIX to SVG, which duplicates the font file size. Is there a more efficient way to do it?
  2. When I generate the woff and woff2 formats and try them on Chrome (MacOS) Version 102.0.5005.61 the glyphs are not visible, on the other hand Safari and Firefox show them as expected, then I realised that Chrome uses its own tables for bitmap fonts
    So my question, is it posible to export the CBDT/CBLC tables from Glyphs app or is there a way to make work the sbix fonts on Chrome? I think maybe I’m missing a parameter I should add. Thank you very much in advance.
1 Like

AFAIK CBDT/CBLC has been abandoned. Rather make an SVG version.

Thank you Rainer, the thing is I didn’t manage to make it work on Google Chrome, do you know if Opentype SVG or SBIX is supported by Chrome? I tested and it didn’t

SVG table is not supported by Chrome and very unlikely it will ever be. But I think sbix is supported, how did you test it and on what platform/Chrome version?

Thank you for your reply @khaled. I’m testing a woff format using @font-face rule. The font contains both SVG and sbix tables. I’m testing on an html doc on MacOS 10.15.4, on Firefox 101.0.1 and Safari Version 13.1 (15609.1.20.111.8) it works well (looks much better on Safari). On the other hand when I open the document in Chrome, the font is not working, just want to know if sbix is supported by Chrome, do you have a link or information source that can confirm that Chrome supports sbix?. Thanks!

Chrome can render emojis from Apple Color Emoji font, so I think it can render sbix glyphs.

Thanks a lot for your reply @khaled I tested with the Apple Emoji font in Chrome and it works as you mention, however I think there’s something else needed by Chrome in order to make work the sbix table because exporting the font directly from Glyphs doesn’t work, the sbix tutorial mentions Chrome supports sbix though, Apple Emoji also contains the trak, morx and meta tables, probably one of them contains some info important to render the font in Chrome, Has anyone produced a bitmap sbix color font that works on Google Chrome?

Yes. I did. Can you send me your .glyphs file?

I found the issue. Chrome assumes a few things that the other implementations don’t need any more.

  1. all images need to be square.
  2. The bounding box of the default master needs to match the size of the image:

    So you need to add another tiny path in the top right. And when you select both, the bounding box info should say 1000/1000.

And you don’t need to add all those smaller sizes if they are just downscaled versions of the biggest image (it might save a tiny bit of performance but wastes a lot bandwidth). Use smaller images only if you actually have a different image.

Thanks a lot Georg! it worked adding the path at the top right of the image bounding box, didn’t have to make the square images. Thank you for the tip about removing the smaller image sizes.

When I used the none square images, the position of the images was quite wrong and some parts where clipped.

I usually add a test glyph like this and type it between each glyph in the test document.