I quite disliked the Latin fonts at first sight, but I like the Arabic ones just as much as I dislike the former. An occasion to contemplate that what may be not that great in the context of Western culture may be still a great thing and useful for another one.
The Arabic scripts are breathtaking but I had some difficulty discerning the Reem Kufi examples. It might be just me, but I've never seen the right+left connected ع drawn that way in Kufi scripts. It seems both alien and a poor match for the rest of the characters in the Reem Kufi fonts - I first thought it was a ligature error!
Reem Kufi designer here, that is the original form of ع in Arabic and the only form used in manuscript Kufi. Kufi-inspired typefaces often use the more familiar form from later calligraphic styles. Reem Kufi has an alternate form as well, but it is not the default.
Next up is sound and interactivity in emojis, including a custom emoji scripting language and emoji platform, and then the inevitable "DOOM ported to emoji" projects.
And of course, web browsers and text rendering become increasingly more complex and expensive to build/maintain because Google single-handedly decided it.
After seeing the beautiful new Arabic fonts in this post, I can't go back to being happy with just simple text for the web. We're still so far from the beauty of calligraphy and even old metal typefaces, with their ligatures and all. We have to dream bigger.
While the parenrt is an ironic comment, color fonts were a staple of computer graphics design during 90s and palettized graphics like VGA 320x200x256 mode. The art was lost with TrueType and now it is coming back. People who have used Deluxe Paint Animator remember this.
Did you read the post? This is a new spec called COLRv1 which adds a bunch of complex rendering features to do what is effectively word art.
Why does this need to be a new spec? Nobody is going to use it for body text. If someone wants those ugly 3D titles, they could use SVG or Canvas.
One of the examples in the OP was colored arabic text for education. That’s an extremely narrow use case which could be entirely supported with custom rendering via SVG, Canvas, WebGL, etc.
This isn’t the end of the world or anything, but it’s annoying and frustrating to see as someone who thinks there should be more browsers and operating systems than the ones Google makes.
There is also a Hangul adaptation of Gilbert called Gilbeot [1]. It also has an interesting feature that censors words that discriminate LGBT people (akin to Sans Bullshit Sans). I do have a feeling that they are clearly decorative and yet still being overused for non-heading text, maybe this is a major problem with many color fonts.
That is a beautiful font. Is it distributed in the same format as what's discussed in the material.io post (COLRv1)? It's still a good example of what's possible; I'm just curious.
Design is highly contextual, so I think it'll depend a lot on how they're used. These fonts seem a lot more polished than what you would find in old-school clip art packs. I can imagine some interesting use cases for these.
And even if these fonts don't hit, people will make more!
To me it's is not necessarily just the colors, but that with the Arabic script the new features are applied in a more tasteful, subtle way. Whereas the latin examples seem more like showing off what you could do, but probably shouldn't.
I've posted this link before (as a ShowHN) - this is my attempt to "replicate" color fonts using my JS canvas library. Getting the effects to be both responsive and amenable to user accessibility choices, while also including ways for developers to adapt the effects via CSS and/or HTML data- attributes ... it's frustrating work. But at least they look pretty. https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/snippets-006.html
That sounds like the entire internet is unlawful. How would a German access any content outside of Germany without going through the tens-hundreds of intermediate routers? There's nothing stopping those routers from logging IPs going through them.
I'm not saying that I agree with the current situation, but as of now it's risk for the developer to use Google Fonts.
To answer your question more specifically, I guess you could argue that it's a layer problem. Lower layers can't prevent "leaking" your ip with the current state of the internet, upper layers can and should.
The issue isn't the existence of intermediary routing, it's the export of data outside the EU by an EU site.
A German resident that wants to access Google or any other US site is fine. The packets are allowed to exit the EU because that's what they asked for.
Using Google Fonts means that your EU users have to access Google, a US company, in order to read your site. Most browsers are configured to do this automatically and opting-out of that would be time-consuming and break the whole web. And using Google Fonts gives Google the unprecedented ability to snoop on third-party sites. Yes, they have promised not to do this, but their host government has also promised to break Google's promise for them.
Taking that same logic and applying it to intermediary routing, the only time in which you'd have a GDPR export case is if you tried to access an EU website and your traffic was rerouted into the US or China. Which actually happens way more often than it should.
For the longest time I thought that was not allowed, and I'm more worried about copyright violations (civil suit) than GDPR violations (criminal law, but I can't imagine a persecutor takes the time to look at my tiny websites. Here there is a saying "where there is no plaintiff there is no judge").
Yeah but that is really debateable. What most people do is just put really broad terms in their data protection declaration. I think there have been a couple "Abmahnungen" but this was never really tested in court, right?
Personally, I think hotlinking should not be considered leaking of PII. Setting a link should not imply endorsement, and embedding an image or an iframe should not create a derived work. The website just gives instructions to the user's browser. I could change the font myself or open another window with the embedded image next to the website, it is merely a convenience. But lawmakers try to put everything in the mold of yesterdays technologies, which is why we cannot have nice things.
Now, how to deal with the fact that Google does get your IP and/or can identify you with cookies? Just ban profiling. It's not so hard.
What's up with svg fonts? I suppose this is a binary format, and presumably smaller and faster to parse than compressed SVG fonts, but I admit I'm a bit surprised that this isn't an improvement to an existing SVG font ecosystem and is instead it's own thing.
It seems that if this was legitimately useful (instead of just one more thing competitors are obligated to spend money on implementing) we'd have seen SVG fonts used for it already.
the Mozilla position on COLRv1 is "Provides comparable design capabilities to OpenType-SVG, but in a more compact and lightweight form that integrates better into font rendering pipelines. Has the potential to supersede OpenType-SVG fonts in web use."
So this seems like a good thing overall. Note that Firefox doesn't support it at this time.
"OpenType-SVG is a font format in which an OpenType font has all or just some of its glyphs represented as SVG (scalable vector graphics) artwork. This allows the display of multiple colors and gradients in a single glyph. Because of these features, we also refer to OpenType-SVG fonts as “color fonts”.
OpenType-SVG fonts allow text to be shown with these graphic qualities, while still allowing it to be edited, indexed, or searched. They may also contain OpenType features that allow glyph substitution or alternate glyph styles."
Nobody wants to be responsible for introducing the security/performance nightmare that is SVG fonts into their codebase. SVG is too big and too unwieldy and does too much to make a good performant font rendering impl. Crucially, OpenType fonts already have their own custom vector format that authoring tools and renderers are used to working with, so this is a form of colored font support that builds on existing font principles instead of stapling an entire SVG renderer inside of it.
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The Arabic scripts look amazing! Gradient support is bigger than color support imo
And of course, web browsers and text rendering become increasingly more complex and expensive to build/maintain because Google single-handedly decided it.
Makes me think of Fontemon:
https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html#player
https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
Perhaps combining this COLRv1 spec and the prior art it's doable today!
https://github.com/mmulet/font-game-engine
Why does this need to be a new spec? Nobody is going to use it for body text. If someone wants those ugly 3D titles, they could use SVG or Canvas.
One of the examples in the OP was colored arabic text for education. That’s an extremely narrow use case which could be entirely supported with custom rendering via SVG, Canvas, WebGL, etc.
This isn’t the end of the world or anything, but it’s annoying and frustrating to see as someone who thinks there should be more browsers and operating systems than the ones Google makes.
[1] https://rainbowfoundation.co.kr/gilbeot
Dead Comment
And even if these fonts don't hit, people will make more!
A German resident that wants to access Google or any other US site is fine. The packets are allowed to exit the EU because that's what they asked for.
Using Google Fonts means that your EU users have to access Google, a US company, in order to read your site. Most browsers are configured to do this automatically and opting-out of that would be time-consuming and break the whole web. And using Google Fonts gives Google the unprecedented ability to snoop on third-party sites. Yes, they have promised not to do this, but their host government has also promised to break Google's promise for them.
Taking that same logic and applying it to intermediary routing, the only time in which you'd have a GDPR export case is if you tried to access an EU website and your traffic was rerouted into the US or China. Which actually happens way more often than it should.
Personally, I think hotlinking should not be considered leaking of PII. Setting a link should not imply endorsement, and embedding an image or an iframe should not create a derived work. The website just gives instructions to the user's browser. I could change the font myself or open another window with the embedded image next to the website, it is merely a convenience. But lawmakers try to put everything in the mold of yesterdays technologies, which is why we cannot have nice things.
Now, how to deal with the fact that Google does get your IP and/or can identify you with cookies? Just ban profiling. It's not so hard.
https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
Therefor selfhosting a Google Font is the way if you still want to use them.
It seems that if this was legitimately useful (instead of just one more thing competitors are obligated to spend money on implementing) we'd have seen SVG fonts used for it already.
Google Chrome teams refuses to implement SVG-in-OT. Instead, they wanted to implemented their COLRv1. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078...
So this seems like a good thing overall. Note that Firefox doesn't support it at this time.
https://color.typekit.com/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/sv...
https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/ot-svg-color-fonts.html
"OpenType-SVG is a font format in which an OpenType font has all or just some of its glyphs represented as SVG (scalable vector graphics) artwork. This allows the display of multiple colors and gradients in a single glyph. Because of these features, we also refer to OpenType-SVG fonts as “color fonts”.
OpenType-SVG fonts allow text to be shown with these graphic qualities, while still allowing it to be edited, indexed, or searched. They may also contain OpenType features that allow glyph substitution or alternate glyph styles."
"every day". as in "each day". The word "everyday" is an adjective.
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