Installing macOS-specific add-on fonts

Ronald Tse

Alexey Morozov on 11 Feb 2022

Introduction

Fontist now allows installing macOS-specific add-on fonts via the fontist command-line interface.

This is to allow continuous integration (CI) jobs on macOS environments to use these specially licensed fonts that are not available on other platforms.

For instance, the "Canela" font is a commercial font that comes free with macOS.

The following demonstration shows how useful this is in a CI environment.

Prerequisites

Install the Canela font on macOS using Fontist:

$ fontist install Canela

Example

The Blood Is At The Doorstep movie poster uses the Canela font. We can potentially generate it using ImageMagick in a CI environment.

This is the original poster:

As described at the ImageMagic convert page, we can use the magick convert command to generate this exact same title.

The command to generate the title:

$ magick convert \
   -size 800x1066 canvas:black \
   -font Canela-Regular-Regular \
   -pointsize 180 \
   -fill white \
   -kerning 0  -interword-spacing 180 -annotate +25+170 'T H E' \
   -kerning 22 -annotate +35+340 'BLOOD' \
   -kerning 60 -interword-spacing 75  -annotate +60+510 'IS AT' \
   -kerning 0  -interword-spacing 180 -annotate +25+680 'T H E' \
   -kerning 60 -annotate +35+850 'DOOR' \
   -kerning 95 -annotate +35+1020 'STEP' \
   poster.png

The generated version is pretty much identical (except for the background).

Figure 2. Generated poster

Final thoughts

As always, if you need help with the new functionality, please post at Fontist Discussions!

References

fontist