@Dominik: Thanks for the detailed write-up, and for driving the process to
ship support for COLR v1 in chromium. Naturally, as collaborator on the
COLR v1 spec, and the one getting it added to OpenType (for version 1.9, to
be released soon), I can say that Microsoft is in general supportive of
this extension to the OpenType format, and am fully in support of seeing
this supported in Chromium.
Color fonts have been around for almost a decade, but have not really taken
off. I suspect a contributing factor for that is that there hasn't been one
format that is widely supported in applications.
I also suspect there hasn't been excitement around the bitmap formats
('sbix' or 'CBDT' tables) because bitmaps aren't scalable and lead to large
font files. (That's especially the case when alternate bitmaps of different
sizes are added to compensate for the lack of scalability.) The bitmap
formats also don't integrate at all with variations, which is a downside
against them.
Clearly a colour vector format is to be preferred. OT-SVG is already
available as a vector format. But for reasons I mentioned in the webkit-dev
list (cited above), I don't think we should expect it to be adopted widely
in environments that don't already have XML and CSS parsers. OT-SVG and
COLR v1 will require similar 2D graphics support, and both require ttf
parsing, but OT-SVG also requires XML/CSS parsing, which is certainly more
complex than parsing the structures added for COLR v1.
COLR v1 also has the significant advantage of being much better integrated
into other aspects of the OpenType format, notably variations.
For all these reasons, I believe the enhanced COLR table has the best
prospects among the various OpenType colour formats of being the one that
eventually gains wide adoption and allows colour fonts to gain significant
interest beyond platform-specific emoji fonts.
@Rego:
> Did we manage to get any further feedback from Apple after that email?
I haven't heard much further from Apple, but I don't expect them to give
away too much. The only public comments I've seen have been in the context
of webkit, which may or may not reflect the perspective of other product
groups. Even with v1, the COLR table doesn't yet provide the level of
graphic capability needed to duplicate the carefully, pixel-by-pixel
crafted designs in their emoji font, so I assume they don't have an
immediate motivation to utilize COLR v1 in their products (unlike Google,
Microsoft and perhaps other vendors who can benefit from COLR v1 with their
emoji designs). So, I'm guessing they're taking a wait-and-see approach,
but that's just a guess.
On Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 11:01:24 AM UTC-7 Manuel Rego wrote:
> Hi Dominik,
>
> On 19/10/2021 09:31, Yoav Weiss wrote:
> > *WebKit:* Negative
> > (https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-March/031765.html <
> https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-March/031765.html>)
> >
> > From the WebKit team, we received this negative response stating
> > there's no real need for COLRv1 as OT-SVG exists, to which I
> > responded extensively in this post
> > <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-May/031839.html>.
> Please
> > refer to this thread for further details. Some API owners are
> > already familiar with this discussion. My response sheds more light
> > on some assertions and assumptions made by WebKit folks and provides
> > a competitive analysis between OT-SVG and COLRv1 in terms of
> > implementation complexity, file size and performance.
> > Microsoft's Peter Constable responded as well
> > <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-April/031789.html>
> > on behalf of Microsoft and Edge positively.
> >
> >
> > I highly appreciate your measured and factful response on that thread as
> > well as Peter's. Thanks for maintaining a high level of discourse.
>
> Yeah really nice reply there.
>
> Did we manage to get any further feedback from Apple after that email?
> Even if it was not directly on the webkit-dev mailing list but in some
> private conversations, working group discussions or whatever.
>
> Cheers,
> Rego
>
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