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Building fonts

Method 1: Using GitLab to automatically build font files

We recommend placing your font repository in GitLab.com in order to take advantage of their auto-build infrastructure. This means that you will only need to push your repository to have your font files built and made available, without having to install anything on your computer.

The font's README.md already includes the download links of the generated files.

Method 2: Build font files in your computer

While it's handy to have GitLab build the font files for you, it takes a couple of minutes to update the finished files after pushing. If you want to build them locally to see your results right away, read below.

Installing dependencies

In order to be able to build the finished font files from the source files, you need the following dependencies installed:

First, install python-fontforge using your OS's package manager. This is necessary, since it's not installable through Pip. On Debian/Ubuntu, just type

sudo apt-get install python-fontforge

And if you don't have it, install python-virtualenv as well.

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

Now, just run make install to pull and install the remaining dependencies.

Finally, clone the bitmapfontbuilder repository to the same directory where you've pulled this font, so that both are inside the same folder.

cd ..
git clone https://gitlab.com/typebits/bitmapfontbuilder

Building locally

Whenever you want to re-generate the font files from the source, just type

make build

This will generate the files in FontForge (.sfd), TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) formats.

Building and deploying to a repository

A better workflow is to create a Git repository from this font directory and running

make deploy

This command is identical to make build but pulls changes from the repository before building, generates the font files, commits the newly built files and pushes the changes back into the remote repository. This is particularly handy if you're working with more people and want to incorporate their changes quickly.