Bug 233496

Summary:	Support for COLRv1 color vector fonts
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Dominik Röttsches (drott) <d-r>
Component:	Text	Assignee:	Nobody <webkit-unassigned>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	Enhancement	CC:	akiem, d-r, mmaxfield, rsheeter, webkit-bug-importer, woodlxf00
Priority:	P2	Keywords:	InRadar
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified

Description Dominik Röttsches (drott) 2021-11-25 08:13:32 PST

This is a feature request for COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts. It'd be great to see support in WebKit, after Google Chrome plans to ship support for this format, and Mozilla and Microsoft have expressed a positive standards position on the format. It also integrates very nicely with WebKit's recent addition of supporting font-palette. Thanks for considering.

Spec: 
https://github.com/googlefonts/colr-gradients-spec/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/otspec190/ot190beta

Examples:
https://github.com/googlefonts/color-fonts

Font Production Tool for COLRv1:
https://github.com/googlefonts/nanoemoji

Firefox Tracking Bug & Standards Position:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1740525
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#font-colrv1

Google Chrome Tracking Bug:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1170733

Previous discussion on webkit-dev:
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-March/031765.html
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-May/031839.html
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-April/031789.html (Peter Constable's (MS) response)

Comment 1 Myles C. Maxfield 2021-11-25 17:27:05 PST

Support for this would be in the platform text libraries, not WebKit itself. Unless I’m misunderstanding?

Comment 2 Dominik Röttsches (drott) 2021-11-29 01:27:15 PST

> Support for this would be in the platform text libraries, not WebKit itself. Unless I’m misunderstanding?

The intention of filing this issue is to have format support in WebKit, as a feature available on the web. Whether that supports originates from platform libraries (as it's done traditionally through CoreText in Safari), or in higher layers is an architectural choice: It's probably possible to implement support for CORLv1 based on FreeType and the platform graphics contexts that WebKit's architecture provides an abstraction for.

Comment 3 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2021-12-02 08:14:20 PST

<rdar://problem/85971830>

Comment 4 akiem 2022-02-21 04:44:55 PST

From a type designer point of view, it would be great to have a better support of the COLRv1 table. For me, one of the key features it provides is not the colors, but that we can also use it as a more advanced glyf table. 

Using only the foreground color, you get everything that the current glyf table provides + a lot of other stuff like transformations, compositing, blending, layering. This makes COLRv1 very different from other color-related tables like SVG, COLOR (version0), six...

Comment 5 Woody Lee 2023-05-14 22:33:24 PDT

OpenType 1.9 has been released for a while now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/

And both Chrome and Firefox has supported it.
https://caniuse.com/colr-v1

Is it any change on position?
Will it been implemented in future milestones?

Comment 6 Myles C. Maxfield 2023-05-15 10:37:48 PDT

If it existed, implementation would be in the platform text libraries in macOS/iOS, not in WebKit. We cannot comment about that.