Kerning and Color Fonts (in Microsoft Office)

Glyphs
1

I’m helping a design studio to create a colour font from their Illustrator files.
I figured, that the SVG format is preferable, since it is supported more widely.
Everything worked out fine, except that the kerning is not working in any version of Word.

Did someone figure this out? Is there a format that will be kerned in Microsoft Office?
Or do we just have to live without kerning?

3

Solution:
Glyphs is still auto-generating incomplete Languagesystem Prefixes.
It should be:

languagesystem DFLT dflt;
languagesystem latn dflt;

That way features and kerning will also work in older versions of Microsoft Word (even in Color Fonts). PowerPoint seems not to be able to kern, nor use LIGA or DLIG features.

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4

I guess the ligature issue could be automated with a script. As a starter, see Script > mekkablue > Color Fonts.

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5

Thanks Rainer, indeed that Add All Color Layers to Selected Glyphs.py script seems exactly what I need.
I could not get it to work in Glyphs 3. But I get what you mean.
One should probably be able to translate your script to Glyphs 3.

Next time! I’ve manually built the layers already.
With a script I could definitely add additional combinations more easily.

6

Just tried again, and the script works as expected in 3.0.3 (3083).

How are you building the color font? Are you working with a color palette?

7

Hi Rainer, my bad. :roll_eyes:
I did not have all modules installed. Works like a charm now!

But as you can read above, the workaround is not necessary.
Putting the two lines of Languagesystems fixes the kerning-problem. :smiley:

Thanks for your patients!

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