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Where's the catch?

What about file size?

A color font file is generally larger than a regular font file, and a lot more when the font embeds high-resolution bitmap characters.



Whereas fonts usually weigh tens to a few hundred kilobytes, color vector fonts can reach hundreds of kilobytes to a couple megabytes depending on their visual complexity.



Color bitmap fonts may range from a few megabytes to tens of megabytes, and sizes increase when multiple color font formats are embedded in a single file.



What about text scalability?

Good question! Color fonts based on vector glyphs can be resized without any loss, just like any regular font.

Scaled color vector font Scaled color bitmap font

Color bitmap fonts, like any other photo or pixel-based image, will scale properly up to a certain size, depending on their original resolution. Beyond that resolution, the lettering will look pixelated.



So whether you print a text with a color bitmap font or display it on high resolution screens, you will have to check up to which size it could properly scale.



As color bitmap fonts will be used in such different contexts like web or print, designers will need several versions of the bitmap font files, with full-size images for desktop editing and downscaled versions for the web.