I'm completely new to making fonts but I was wondering is there a font format that can accommodate fonts with gradients and multiple shades?

If so, where could I use it, I assume not with css? could I use it within inkscape?

There's a standard for "SVG Fonts" which basically lets you define arbitrary SVG (including colours, gradients, filters and so on) that is mapped to your character set. Inkscape even includes a tool to help you create them. Sounds perfect, doesn't it? But...

1) You can't actually use SVG Fonts within an Inkscape document! Yes, even though you can use Inkscape to create them, it won't then let you use them.

2) Mozilla have stated that they will never support SVG Fonts, due to a lack of internationalisation capability. In my opinion this is a short-sighted decision, because it instead forces people to render their text as an image of some sort that isn't accessible in any way, for readers in any language. I would have preferred them to have implemented SVG Fonts (some other browsers do support them), and worked with the SVG working group to extend the spec to add the missing features.

In practice this means that SVG fonts are a dead-end, and probably not worth spending time on.


There's a proposal to allow SVG glyphs to be embedded inside OpenType fonts (http://www.w3.org/2013/10/SVG_in_OpenType/). This would allow colours, gradients and so on, combined with the internationalisation capabilities of OpenType. The bad news is that it's still just a proposal, and I'm not aware of any real-world usage or testing going on, let alone tools to help create such a font. The other bad news is that one of the main benefits of SVG Fonts (the ability to manipulate them dynamically in a browser using the DOM) has been lost because the SVG is now opaquely wrapped inside the OpenType container. The suggestion is that JS libraries will be developed to allow updates and changes, but no such libraries exist yet, and it's still not as immediate as being able to see, inspect and change the XML in the same way as any other SVG or HTML element.


I'm not aware of any other font format that would let you do what you want. Some font and colour effects can be faked by stacking several specially designed fonts on each other, but otherwise you're round to manipulating each glyph as a separate image. It would be possible, for example, to write some JS to replace a string of text on a web page with individual glyph images in SVG or PNG format, but I'm not sure that's the kind of thing you're looking for.

Ok thanks, that answers my question.

It's a shame, it would be nice to be able to use svg fonts.