Re: [css-fonts] selecting color or monochrome glyphs for emoji fonts

John Daggett wrote:
> As emoji fonts gain popularity across platforms, authors are
> starting to run into problems where they end up getting a color
> emoji glyph for a symbol they desire to be monochrome (for an
> example bug report, see [1]). I'm thinking it might make sense to
> have a CSS property to allow authors to explicitly control this:
>
> font-variant-color: auto | color | monochrome
> initial value: auto

This sounds like a good idea to me.

> Like other font-variant property values, this would only affect
> glyph selection. If alternate glyphs are not available, using this
> property would not affect how text is rendered. User agents must not
> try and simulate fallback glyphs for fonts lacking color glyphs.

What happens if you use "font-variant-color: monochrome" and the font 
has a colour glyph but no monochrome glyph?

> I should note here that all the color font formats in use currently
> (Apple/Google/Microsoft/SVG) all add additional tables to a TrueType
> font to contain the color glyph data. So there are typically
> monochrome glyphs for all characters but not necessarily color
> glyphs.

Do you think we need a way to select between the different coloured font 
tables?  I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll see fonts with CBDT 
and SVG and COLR tables, but it's possible.

Received on Thursday, 21 August 2014 08:09:36 UTC