Giphurs font

Your average Arial/Helvetica/Circular on budget, made with Fontforge.

⚠️ Important

The weights below 400 (Thin, ExtraLight, Light) aren't fully implemented yet. As of version 0.9.2 only font features (small caps, glyphs alternates etc.) aren't implemented yet), but if you don't use them it will most likely work correctly.

Note that those weights are only available for versions 0.9.0+ (marked as "pre-releases")

Status of the project

This project isn't complete and is under development. Things may change at any time.

The end goal is to upload this font on Google Fonts.

I'm aware that there's already some issues, for example the font version being invalid for Google Fonts, but while I don't have a finished version, the version will be still under 1.0, it's intended.

TODO list

• Implement weight 100 (Thin).
• Add italic.
• Fix other small problems that Font Bakery complains about.
• Improve font documentation (if it even exists).
• Add better pictures of the font and better description.

Real list is here: https://github.com/users/Corne2Plum3/projects/2

Download

Go in releases page and pick the latest version. The font is available in the following formats: otf, ttf and woff2.

You also have "SC" versions of the font (currently available for weights 400 and above) which uses small caps.

Note that these are currenly pre-releases, so the font may contain issues and everything can be changed in the future.

Build the fonts

0. Requirements

Before going further, you're going to need these.

• Python 3.10 or newer version.
• pip to install the Python packages.

1. Setup

Everything that you will need will be installed on a virtual environment. So in this section you will make a virtual environment and add the dependencies inside (they're all based on Python stuff so it should be simple).

Note: for now, the guide only works on Debian based distributions (especially section 1.2). If you managed to generate the fonts file from another distribution, you can open a PR so we can add it here.

1.1. Create the virtual environment

In this section you will make a virtual environment and add the dependencies inside, so you don't touch your existing system.

1. Ensure that the current working directory is the root of the project. If not, run the following command, replacing path/to/the/folder/project by the path of the directory of the project, basically where the file you're reading right now is in.

   cd path/to/the/folder/project

2. Create a python virtual environment. To do so, execute:

   python3 -m venv venv

3. Move to the virtual environment you just have created:

   source venv/bin/activate 

1.2. Install the Python packages

In this section you will install the dependencies (all Python libraries) inside the virtual environment. All of them are listed in the requirements.txt file, except one, fontforge which cannot be obtained through pip, but it can be obtained through a package manager (for example apt).

1. Install all the python packages from requirements.txt:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Now let's install the fontforge module inside the virtual environment. First we need to download it (and NOT install it for now)

   sudo apt download python3-fontforge

3. Once the package downloaded, you should have get a .deb file. Let's extract its content and store it on a folder called temp. Don't forget to replace the python3-fontforge.deb by the name of the .deb obtained previously.

   dpkg -x python3-fontforge.deb temp/

4. Move the content of temp/ (the Python package that we need) inside the virtual environment created earlier. Its folder should be called venv. As the folder names may varies, locate inside the venv where the python packages are installed. For example: venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/. You should end up in a directory with a lot of directories, with some of them with the name of packages installed in step 1. It's here you gonna add the fontforge package. Run the following command:

   mv ./temp/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/* ./venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/

   Don't forget to replace the 2nd argument (./venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/) by the name of the folder you located above.

5. Delete the temp folder and the .deb file as we don't need them anymore.

6. To ensure that fontforge is installed inside the virtual environment:

   • If you're not yet inside the virtual environment, to the step 3 from the section 1.
   • Then, run "python3" in your terminal.
   • Once in the Python console, run "import fontforge". If you don't get an error, it's fine.

2. Build the font

Once all dependencies are ready, you can finally build the font. Inside the sources folder you have different scripts to make the font files. All of them must be run with the sources folder as working directory else they won't work. If you just want to build the font, just run:

make fonts

(it will also run make ufo if you don't have these)

List of the available scripts

Since v0.8.0, a Makefile is used to build the fonts. Your working directory must be where the Makefile is (aka in the root folder of the repo)

• make ufo: convert all sfd sources into ufo files, which are needed to build the font files (otf, ttf, woff2)

• make fonts: build the font files: otf, ttf (static + variable) and woff2. Needs the ufo files created before.

• make export_fonts: create a zip archive of the fonts folder. Should be used after using make fonts.

• make clean: removes the files generated during the build.

License

This font is under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.