FontLab TV: color fonts without tears
Color fonts have stopped being a novelty and started being a deliverable — emoji, branded display faces, multi-layered display work. The FontLab TV color font episode covers the four formats you actually have to think about and which to ship for which target.
What it covers¶
The four formats.
- OpenType+COLR v0 — layered solid-color glyphs. Tiny file size, broad support. The default for branded display work. (What’s not covered is COLR v1: gradients, transforms, paint graphs. The new hotness. Increasing browser and OS support.)
- OpenType+SVG — full SVG glyphs. Maximum flexibility, larger files.
- OpenType+sbix and OpenType+CBDT — bitmap glyph tables. Used by Apple emoji and similar.
The episode walks through which to use when. Layered (COLR v0) is the safe default. COLR v1 and SVG when you need gradients (COLR v1 works in Chrome-based browsers, SVG works in Safari, Firefox, in macOS and in Adobe apps).
Drawing layered glyphs. FontLab handles the layered approach via element-based glyph composition: each color in the final glyph is a separate element with its own fill. The video shows the workflow for building, previewing, and exporting.
CPAL palettes. A single font can carry multiple palettes, and renderers can switch between them. Useful for dark/light mode display fonts and for shipping brand variants in one binary.
Export. FontLab exports to all four formats from the same source. The episode shows the export dialog flags and how to verify the output in a browser and in modern OS rendering.
Why it matters¶
Color fonts are now production-grade for display, branding, and app-icon contexts — not just emoji. This episode is the fastest way from “I have a layered illustration” to “I have a working color OpenType that ships.”