Hi,
This is probably both a spec question & a technical question. What is the 
recommendation for COLRv1 when the rendering target media is not capable of 
color?
OT-SVG probably has its rules inherited from SVG; or at least, it doesn't feel 
too odd to use SVG solely for color output, and glyf/CFF for 8-bit gray with 
anti-aliasing.
With COLRv0, the decisions of solid colours vs gray with anti-aliasing 
semi-transparent edges probably isn't too hard either.
I have finished adding COLRv1-capability to ft2-demos (that potentially means 
any FreeType-based system/software is then COLRv1-able), but was faced with two 
interesting choices:
- COLRv1 layers have alpha channels too, so one way of doing it is to throw 
away all the colours, and collapse all the alpha layers and draw the foreground 
colour (ie black) through the alpha channel.
- throw away the alpha channels, convert RGB to gray levels.
The two differ quite significantly if you have dark but transparent colours vs 
pale but solid colours.
In terms of implementation details, some systems might eventually choose to 
"lie" about legacy (non-colour) fonts as all having exactly 1 layer with a 
default palette of B/W, to simplify and unify APIs of accessing colour-layered 
and non-colour fonts?
A somewhat related question - colour fonts are used beyond emoji's. While there 
are 5 kinds of emoji fonts now, and most people are using one of 4... but if 
you check Google Fonts, there are 10 colour fonts, one is emoji, but 6 are 
Arabic (useful for annotating the Quran...) and 3 are Latin. So there are 
intentions for text fonts. A few percents of western male population is 
color-blind. Colour-blindness is one of the most common eye problems, after 
short-sightedness :-).
Screenshots at the bottom half of the web page below, and I'll continue the 
more technical stuff on freetype-devel.

https://github.com/HinTak/harfbuzz-python-demos/tree/master/skia-adventure

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