What are COLR and CPAL tables?
Traditional fonts store monochrome outlines. In an OpenType color font, the COLR table defines layered glyph components, while the CPAL (Color Palette) table defines sets of colors assigned to each layer.
For example, in Nishu Color, each glyph is composed of dual vector layers rendered in the iconic Karnataka yellow and red colors.
- COLR table: defines glyph layer geometry and stacking order
- CPAL table: stores one or more 32-bit color palettes
- Fallback: standard TrueType/CFF outlines render automatically in older software
Inspecting color palettes with Lipi Font Analyzer
Upload any font to Lipi Universal Font Analyzer to immediately inspect whether it contains COLR and CPAL tables. You can view all embedded palettes, inspect the exact hex codes of every color entry, and test live palette switching.
Customizing color palettes on the web with CSS
Modern web browsers support the CSS @font-palette-values at-rule. You can override specific palette indices or recolor entire fonts dynamically without modifying the font binary file.
Simply declare @font-palette-values with override-colors: 0 #color1, 1 #color2; and apply font-palette: --your-palette to your elements.