COLR/CPAL

COLR

Design & Typography

OpenType color font tables that define emoji as layered vector shapes with a color palette, used by Windows and Chrome.

COLR (Color) and CPAL (Color Palette) are OpenType tables that work together to render color glyphs. COLR defines layers of standard glyph outlines, and CPAL provides color palettes to fill those layers.

COLR version 1 (COLRv1) added gradients, compositing, and transformations, significantly improving the quality of vector emoji. Google adopted COLRv1 for Chrome and Android, providing a compact alternative to bitmap fonts.

Advantages of COLR: smaller file sizes than bitmaps, perfect scaling, and the ability to theme emoji with different color palettes.

Related Terms

CBDT/CBLC (CBDT) CBDT/CBLC (CBDT)
Color Bitmap Data Table and Color Bitmap Location Table — OpenType tables for embedding bitmap color emoji in fonts. OpenType OpenType
A font format developed by Microsoft and Adobe that supports color emoji rendering through multiple color table technologies. SVG in OpenType (SVGinOT) SVG in OpenType (SVGinOT)
A method of embedding SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) documents directly in OpenType font files for scalable color emoji. Vector Emoji Vector Emoji
Emoji rendered using scalable vector graphics (SVG or COLR) that remain crisp at any display size.

Related Tools

🔀 Platform Compare Platform Compare
Compare how emojis render across Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and more. See visual differences side by side. 🔢 Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities.

Related Stories

How Emoji Rendering Works Across Platforms: Font Stacks and Fallbacks
Understand how operating systems render emoji differently, how font stacks work, and how to handle fallbacks in web and native applications.
How Emoji Fonts Work: COLR, CBDT, sbix, and SVG Font Tables
A technical deep-dive into emoji font formats: COLR/CPAL vector layering, CBDT/CBLC bitmap embedding, sbix Apple bitmaps, and SVG-in-OpenType.