Bug 233496 – Support for COLRv1 color vector fonts

• Status: NEW
• Component: Text

[Dominik Röttsches (drott)]

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)

[Myles C. Maxfield]

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

[Dominik Röttsches (drott)]

> 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.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/85971830>

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...

[Woody Lee]

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?

[Myles C. Maxfield]

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

[Woody Lee]

I don't know whether it depends on OS or not.
But how did Chrome do with it in Mac OS?

Tested with https://colrv1-emoji-vs-cbdt.glitch.me/