Fontist Font Formulas

Purpose

In Fontist, a “Font Formula” is used to install one or several fonts.

This structure is modelled after Homebrew’s Formula.

Structure of a Formula

Each Formula defines:

• what fonts are provided by this Formula

• metadata of the Formula

• what remote resources are needed to be downloaded

• for each font provided, what styles are provided and their filenames

• mechanism for installing the fonts

• mechanism to test that fonts are installed

Basic formula

name: Source
description: Adobe Source Fonts
homepage: https://www.adobe.com
...

The description, homepage attributes are used to register metadata for the Formula.

Resources

Resources are remotely fetched data.

In this example, the file source-fonts.zip is to be downloaded from the URL https://github.com/fontist/source-fonts/releases/download/v1.0/source-fonts-1.0.zip.

EXAMPLE:

resources:
  source-fonts.zip:
    urls:
    - https://github.com/fontist/source-fonts/releases/download/v1.0/source-fonts-1.0.zip
    sha256: 0107b5d4ba305cb4dff2ba19138407aa2153632a2c41592f74d20cd0d0261bfd

• The urls attribute lets you specify where to download this resource from.

• The sha256 command checks the downloaded file against the provided SHA-256 hash.

In some cases, multiple URLs are provided if they are not the most reliable.

EXAMPLE:

resources:
  PowerPointViewer.exe:
    urls:
    - https://gitlab.com/fontmirror/archive/-/raw/master/PowerPointViewer.exe
    - https://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/project/mscorefonts2/cabs/PowerPointViewer.exe
    - https://archive.org/download/PowerPointViewer_201801/PowerPointViewer.exe
    sha256: 249473568eba7a1e4f95498acba594e0f42e6581add4dead70c1dfb908a09423
    file_size: '62914560'

• The urls command lets you set multiple URLs.

• The file_size command checks against file size downloaded.

Declaring fonts provided

The fonts attribute lets you declare fonts provided by this Formula.

fonts contains two attributes here:

• Font family name. For example, in the case of Adobe Source Code Pro, it is Source Code Pro. This name is only used in Fontist (e.g. for installing) and does not affect the usage of installed fonts.

• A styles hash: a hash that maps font styles (e.g. “Bold”) to a filename, used for detection of fonts. These fields are commonly filled by the otfinfo utility.

  • Required fields are:

    • family_name

    • type

    • full_name

    • font

  • Other fields are optional:

    • post_script_name

    • version

    • description

    • copyright

EXAMPLE:

- name: Source Code Pro
  styles:
  - family_name: Source Code Pro
    type: Regular
    full_name: Source Code Pro
    post_script_name: SourceCodePro-Regular
    version: 2.030
    description:
    copyright: Copyright 2010, 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated (http://www.adobe.com/),
      with Reserved Font Name ‘Source’.
    font: SourceCodePro-Regular.ttf
  - family_name: Source Code Pro
    type: Italic
    full_name: Source Code Pro Italic
    post_script_name: SourceCodePro-It
    version: 1.050
    description:
    copyright: Copyright 2010, 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated (http://www.adobe.com/),
      with Reserved Font Name ‘Source’.
    font: SourceCodePro-It.ttf

All these declared fonts are stored inside the Formula when defined.

Declaring font collections and their fonts

Sometimes fonts are provided in TTC format (truetype collection) meaning that a single file can contain multiple fonts.

The font_collections attribute is used to declare font collections and the fonts within.

It contains the following attributes:

• filename: the filename of this font collection, used for detection.

• fonts: this works slightly different than from the fonts at the top level. It still takes two attributes, the font family name and a styles hash. The styles hash only accepts type and full_name, which is a map from the font style (e.g., “Bold”) to the font name inside the font collection.

EXAMPLE:

This example shows that:

• the font collection can be identified with the filename CAMBRIA.TTC;

• it contains two fonts, “Cambria” and “Cambria Math”;

• the font “Cambria” with style “Regular” is provided by extracting Cambria from CAMBRIA.TTC

• the font “Cambria Math” (default “Regular”) is provided by extracting Cambria Math from CAMBRIA.TTC

font_collections:
- filename: CAMBRIA.TTC
  fonts:
  - name: Cambria
    styles:
    - type: Regular
      full_name: Cambria
  - name: Cambria Math
    styles:
    - type: Regular

All these declared fonts are stored inside the Formula when defined.

Retrieving resources and extracting them

The extract attribute is used to retrieve and extract resources.

It could consist of one or more instructions. Each instruction has several attributes:

• format (required), could be zip, cab, or exe

• file (optional), which file to use if there are several ones

• options (optional), options to pass to an extractor, e.g. zip takes an fonts_sub_dir parameter

Once the extract method finishes, Fontist would have a full map of where each declared font is located.

EXAMPLE:

extract:
  format: zip
  options:
    fonts_sub_dir: fonts/

EXAMPLE:

extract:
- format: exe
- format: cab
  file: ppviewer.cab