Creating custom Fontist font formulas

^{By Ronald Tse and Alexey Morozov on 2 March 2024}

Easily create Fontist font formulas from font packages hosted online.

Purpose

Consider this scenario: you require a specific font for either your Continuous Integration system or your software.

If the font is already available as a Fontist font formula, you can directly install that font.

But what if it's not there yet?

You can easily create a Fontist font formula from a package hosted online, even if it is complex and has an archive-in-archive structure.

Creating a Fontist font formula from a package

First you need to create a formula providing a URL to an archive:

$ fontist create-formula http://example.com/archive.pkg
some_font.yml formula has been successfully created

Then this formula should be placed in a formula repository, then the Fontist font formula index needs to be rebuilt:

$ cp some_font.yml ~/.fontist/versions/v3/formulas/Formulas/
$ fontist rebuild-index

That's it! Now the fonts from the package can be installed and used:

$ fontist install "Some Font"
Fonts installed at:
- /Users/john/.fontist/fonts/some_font.ttf

Contributing a Fontist font formula

If the font formula you created is of a font that is openly licensed, please feel free to contribute it to the official Fontist font formulas repository so others could also use it.

To do so, please create a Pull Request to the repository and add the formula YAML file (*.yaml) to it. A member of the Fontist team will then attend to the contribution as soon as we can.

Private font formulas

If the font package in question is not to be shared online (such as a purchased, commercially-licensed font), Fontist supports Custom Fontist repositories to manage your own fonts and your own formulas.

Compression methods supported

Fontist implements support for many compression methods, some of those not even readily available on popular OS platforms.

Currently, Fontist supports decompression of files of the following archival methods commonly used for font packages:

• Cabinet / CAB (extension: *.cab), the file format from Microsoft.
• cpio (extension: *.cpio), the Unix "copy in and out" utility, defined in IEEE Std 1003.2 ("POSIX.2").
• ZIP (extension: *.zip) and ZIP-based self-extracting archives (extension: *.exe).
• gzip (extension: *.gzip) commonly used on Unix systems.
• OLE from Microsoft used in the packaging of the Windows Installer archives (extension: *.msi, *.msp).
• RPM (extension: *.rpm) installation packages used on Linux systems.
• tar the Unix archival format.
• XAR (extensions: *.xar, *.pkg, *.xip) from Apple, used in macOS installation packages and the App Store.

Fontist relies on the excavate Ruby library for decompression, with the latest list of supported compression methods available here.

Fontist now also supports decompression of files through the comprehensive libarchive library (the Fontist version of libarchive in Ruby). This enhancement opens up the possibility of supporting a wider range of compression methods.

Conclusion

Fontist now supports a growing number of fonts and can serve as a convenient method to install fonts programmatically, especially for continuous integration systems.

Discover new fonts you can use with fontist and which packages you found online could be converted into font formulas.