No easy way to work with COLR fonts

[michaelrafailyk]

@GeorgSeifert

Can you send me a sample file?

Sent in a private message.

@Arthus

Do you use any stroke effects (only causes issues with variable exports).

Hi Arthur. There are no strokes or effects, just solid fill colors.

@Arthus

Does the (for example) /oacute have exactly the same color layers as the separate components?

I tried same Color Palette layers (see an option 3 below).
Here’s a few different ways I tried (in Glyphs 3.1.2):

1. Compose from scratch (take a look at my next comment below), from the base glyph and mark (both have different Color Palette layers, and appropriate anchors on Master layer) as I usually do like Glyph → Create Composite. Important moment – base glyph and mark glyph have different Color Palette layers and their count, not the same. The result was just base Master layer in a black color. That mean, the Color Palette layers are not translated automatically to composed glyph. And I don’t know if they should.
2. Duplicate an anchor from fallback master to every nested Color Palette layers of the glyph, for both base and mark. Generate composite. Nothing changed.
3. Manually adding empty Color Palette layers to composite glyph, the same that base glyph and mark glyph contains, in the same order (in layers list) for each one of them. I tried both orders – base layers first and then mark layers, and mark layers first and then base layers, no difference. All of these layers display just the color components of the base glyph but not the mark. So it works halfway. The result I described at the last paragraph of my previous comment above.
4. I also tried to create an additional empty Color Palette layers for both base and mark glyphs to synchronize their count and order between base and mark. Generate composite. Nothing changed.

@Arthus

And the colours preview properly in Glyphs?

A glyphs builded with components are displayed in a black in the Font tab preview and Preview panel, however the glyphs without components are displayed in color.

@Arthus

And when exported, how about with the font-preview, or through a third-party program such as Fontgoggles?

The font file preview (I saw it on macOS in Finder, and also checked in the Font Book) show just English alphabet and default numbers (which doesn’t have components), and these glyphs are in color in preview. But I can’t check the preview for components ones, so I checked their render directly on the web browsers and Adobe applications.