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:
python-virtualenv
- FontForge and its Python bindings
- fib
- bitmapfontbuilder
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.