[PeterGriffin]

It's not "the future of color fonts", it's just the present of emoji in Windows. And I really don't like the way they did this.

The technical approach is smart, but lazy, and the resulting emoji look bland and lack definition. No wonder, since this approach doesn't support the way artists work. It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. It must be a pain to split your pictures in layers so they can be in a font like that.

As far as using this for text... the novelty of such effects faded out sometime in the 90s when Word Art was all the rage among design-blind office workers.

In the modern world of Unicode, it's even less likely we'll start making fonts with hardcoded layers of cheesy effects when you need to cover a good range of international characters, weights, cursive, hints, kern pairs, ligatures, alternate versions and so on.

[derefr]

> It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects.

Well thank god. What you call "opacity, gradients, and effects", I call "total inability to be bolded, colored, embossed, etc." Apple's and Google's emoji basically entirely ignore CSS in favor of looking, well, exactly the way they look. Styling emoji to actually fit your site's theme? Who'd have imagined?

[PeterGriffin]

You seem so passionate about this, it hurts to break your heart.

When you set your text to be bold, that's a separate font, made by a human hand.

Browsers have a fake bold look when the font is missing, but it's not a look you want on your site. They just, well... smudge it to the right. For Emoji the fake bold look is disabled, because bold or italic emoji is just non-sense on the face of it, so they don't support weight settings.

Also, you can't set the color of Windows Emoji via CSS. They're already colored.

[kevingadd]

The design of the windows approach to colored fonts actually has affordances for recoloring the text. It's not implemented, but it's mentioned in overviews of the format.

Because the colored glyphs use a palette instead of hard-coded colors, it's possible to assign semantic meanings or names to each palette entry and remap them. This would enable you to render a 'high contrast' version, or adjust the primary color of an emoji (for example, changing the skin tone of a face), etc.

The latter is actually a topic of concern: Most current emoji represent a caucasian or light-skinned individual, so the lack of emojis that represent other races is a problem. People are still figuring out how to deal with it.