1740525 - [meta] Support COLRv1 fonts

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

Description

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

We should look into supporting the new/forthcoming COLRv1 format for color fonts. This promises to provide similarly-rich graphic capabilities to SVG-in-OpenType, in a form that will be more compact and efficient.

(My expectation is that COLRv1 may essentially supersede SVG-in-OT, and in due course we will be able to consider deprecating that format and eventually removing support for it.)

https://github.com/googlefonts/colr-gradients-spec/
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/497

Comment 1

[Rod]

Heads up that Android 13 is expected to deploy COLRv1 system emoji. I filed https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/24350 for Android specific issues. Happy to close that and move the details here if that would be more helpful.

Comment 2

[Makoto Kato [:m_kato]]

Freetype has COLRv1 support, so if we support it for Android/Linux only, we can delegate render it to freetype for COLRv1 like Apple's color font.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to Makoto Kato [:m_kato] from comment #2)

Freetype has COLRv1 support, so if we support it for Android/Linux only, we can delegate render it to freetype for COLRv1 like Apple's color font.

Yes, that's a possible way forward for those platforms, though on desktop Linux we use system freetype, so we'd be dependent on what version is present; some older "stable" distros might not be shipping a COLRv1-capable freetype for a while yet.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

At this point, implementation is complete and all (currently-known) issues are resolved; I think we can close this as completed.

New bugs can of course be filed for any fresh problems that are noticed as the feature gets wider testing and usage.