PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tags color & mac

A while ago I researched out of curiosity if it was possible to build fonts with embedded colour bitmaps like the Apple Color Emoji font on Mac OS 10.7/10.8. I figured out the «sbix» table format and wrote some code that can be hooked into the Python FontTools to decompile and compile the sbix table which contains the image data.

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the “Atkinson” dithering filter. Years ago, during the development of the first Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & now nature photography fame) discovered a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data for the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or “Error-diffusion” filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop).

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, Adobe® Photoshop®, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum.