Strange behaviour when outlining COLRv1 fonts
I have been running into some issues with COLRv1 fonts when turning them into outlines: The normal font renders as intended, when outlined some colours turn off one of the RGB channels (turning white to yellow). See the example in the screenshots where the white (circled) is turned into yellow. This is independent from the "yellow palette" of the letter, in other COLRv1 fonts white also turns into full RGB yellow.
See Nabla as an example:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nabla
I don't believe this is caused by the "white" (as the error also turns, for instance, black into blue, removing a single RGB channel as well). I suspect it's converting the layers (of which the colorfont is constructed) in a faulty way.
This happens in Illustrator '26 (30.3 to 30.7), but I have also seen it happen in Illustrator '25, though only rarely. It doesn't happen in CMYK files: only RGB files and regardless of color space.
Noto Emoji also creates a lot of rendering bugs, but as I haven't created the font I don't know much of it's construction. But perhaps good to take along. This font also includes some gradients which are flattened to bitmaps in a RGB file. See the hat and hair of the 🏌️ emoji when outlined [ Golfer (U+1F3CC) ].
Typearture
shared this idea
-
Typearture
commented
I upgraded to 30.8 last night and it seems all the errors have disappeared, even the Noto icons outline properly. My client now also has the correct results, so I'm waiting for results from the final client.
All in all a strange bug. If it works, the only thing left of my report is the bitmapping of gradients.
-
Not for me... here’s what I see.
It must be the OS / hardware difference then. Can you collect as much data describing yours and your client’s (if possible) computer’s configuration? This would help to test this at the team’s side. -
Typearture
commented
Thanks for looking into this issue!
Strange, as my client, and client's client both have this issue. I have attached my source Illustrator file just incase, as it still happens in this file for me.
Also as an example, below is what happens with Noto Emoji for me when used as a font/outlined. As you can see the gradient is bitmapped, but also every color is wrong. There are "overlay" shadows used, so I can understand those might not convert well, but the other tones: As far as I can see they are solid tones so I can't really think of a reason for the outlining process behaving like this.
-
Can’t reproduce in an RGB doc, both in the Beta or the GA builds... white highlights remain white for me :(
Noto Color Emoji — I see, gradients indeed get rasterized (not all, but some). I suspect these are not linear or circular, so Ai HAS to rasterize them? Can’t confirm, just a guess.. The hat’s one looks very circular though, when I check the raster... Plus I see the hair becoming white-with-color, like if the blending mode gets lost... if you zoom in the glyph a lot, you’ll see it was never accurate, but it’s not a reason to loose the blending.
