How to create a colored font?

22

So, InDesign supports no colour fonts at the moment, right?

23

What are those custom parameters Georg?
As I understand it will convert Microsoft style color font to SVG color font at export time. Am I right?
This would be great waiting and hoping CPAL Microsoft style to be an available on Mac platform and on software.
There seems to have sign of better support for SVG (with Adobe in this team) and all itā€™s possibilities but I think Microsoft style is a better approach, which would also better fit InDesign.

24

Yes sadly. No change in InDesign CC 2017, only Photoshop now support SVG flavor.

25

Ok @GeorgSeifert I found ā€œColor layers to SVGā€. Itā€™s great and worked on Photoshop CC 2017. Great!

26

When you want to export an SVG font for Adobe app, whatā€™s the font format you need to choose?

27

OTF will work with Color layers to SVG. I havenā€˜t tried TrueType.

A warning about Photoshop.
Photoshopā€™s font detection and caching are broken. So you canā€™t just keep updating the same file like with Indesign and Illustrator. Put a version number in the font name and update it each time you export an updated design.

1 Like
28

Hi, I guess Iā€™m facing a similar problem.
I want to implement a set of two colored icons, which should work via discretionary ligatures.
Iā€™ve read into the multicolor/layered fonts tutorials, but Iā€™m still not quite sure if there is a way designing them in Glyphs with preset colors and using them in Word under Windows or TextEdit in OS X.
In Adobe Apps Georg mentioned the use of layers, which is ok. For my problem with Word i was thinking about splitting the icons in half and color each half afterwards by hand.
But now you mentioned this could be done with a little code as well? Could it be done with preset RGB/CMYK values for each half and would it be wise to use unicode (e.g. private use area) instead of dlig?

Thank you!

29

To my knowledge, Word currently does not support color fonts. You could try a hack. For instance, splitting the letter halves into uppercase and lowercase sets, in Word type every letter twice like this: HhEeLlLlOo, and then have a VBA script color every other letter differently. I cannot help you with the VBA script, I am afraid.

30

Thanks for the quick answer!
Iā€™ll try that and maybe it will be sufficient enough.