+1, thanks for driving this Dominik. Edge is looking forward to COLRv1
shipping to provide a compact format that enables a wider set of features
that icon and emoji fonts can take advantage of.
On Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 5:43:52 AM UTC-10 [email protected]
wrote:
> @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
>>
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/d0fafd49-718d-4f3c-93c4-926f4d7c0e81n%40chromium.org.
