Chromatic fonts – implementation roundup
The implementation of SVG glyphs for OpenType in Firefox is well known. Recently however with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I noticed that Microsoft Edge 14 also now supports them!
Check to see what your browser supports!
Unfortunately, there is currently a scaling bug which makes each SVG glyph twice as big as it should be. But I am sure that will be fixed pretty soon. Compare these SVG glyphs vs. inline SVG, in Firefox and then in Edge 14.
A little digging reveals even better news – this isn’t an Edge-specific update. Instead DirectWrite and Direct2D have been updated to support SVG in OpenType (also the Google CBDT colored PNG glyphs and the Apple sbix colored raster format. (This is in addition to the existing COLR/CPAL support that has been there since Windows 8.1).
Amusingly, this means that Edge 14 has better support for the Google-originated CBDT fonts than Google Chrome itself has, due to a bug in the Chrome OpenType sanitizer which rejects CBDT fonts for not having a glyf table. This means that Chrome will currently only display CBDT fonts that are installed, not ones loaded by @font-face.
Thank, Chris Lilley for the info. Although its a late comment but I never knew about Chromatic fonts. I will study it.
Best Regards
Katia Cooper
Howdy Chris Lilley!
This is a great information for us. Those are gorgeous Chromatic fonts.
Thanks!
Overall really useful article on how to use the chromatic font, I loved it. But designing a font/typeface isn’t easy. ! I would like to make my own handwriting into a font, so this article was very useful, thank you
Chromatic font is totally a new term for me. I have not heard about in my career. Thanks for writing about this.