Fontie

The deamon that is running in the back of Fontie. It is licensed as open source under the AGPL v3.

The code is working and used in production. However, it is not really fit for public use. Originally I wanted to refactor the code , but I’ve never found the time to do so - sry for that. I really, really appreciate any clean-up/optimizing PRs from experienced Python/Fontforge developers. But also other PRs are nice, too :)

Installation

This guide assumes that you are simply trying to run fontie on your own Linux/UNIX-ish computer. This guide is a work in progress and not guaranteed to work.

dependencies

These MUST be installed before you attempt to convert a font with fontie!!

• fontforge python package
  • See "using fontforge as a python package"
• ttfautohint
  • apt install -y ttfautohint worked for me.
  • you can download source from https://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/ in case you can't find a pre-built package for your system.
  • test your installation by running ttfautohint
• /opt/woff2/woff2_compress
  • I downloaded this from https://github.com/google/woff2 with cd /opt && git clone https://github.com/google/woff2 && cd woff2
  • In order to build this, you need to initialize and pull the git submodules. git submodule init && git submodule update brotli
  • finally, in order to build it, run make.
  • test it by running /opt/woff2/woff2_compress
• scour
  • apt install -y scour
• wine /opt/eotfast/EOTFAST-1.EXE
  • this is only required for building eot fonts (internet explorer)
  • TODO how to install this is undocumented

obtaining fontie

First, clone the fontforge repository:

# some scripts in the source code are hard-coded to /opt/fontie. So we clone the repo there.
cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/ForestJohnson/fontie 
cd fontie

using fontforge as a python package

You can't actually install fontforge python package via pip! fontforge/fontforge#4377 So you have to install it via your OS package manager.

For ubuntu/debian for example:

apt install -y fontforge

NOTE: According to https://fontforge.org/docs/scripting/python.html#python-extension

In python terms fontforge embeds python, It is possible to build fontforge so that it is also a python extension.

...

fontforge typically installs a Python module accessible to the system’s python executable, which can be accessed using:

import fontforge

However, if you run python3 bin/fontie.py you might get:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'fontforge'

We can sidestep this problem by running the fontie API server through the fontforge embedded python:

fontforge -lang=py -script bin/fontie.py 

Hosting Fontie Locally

TODO How to set up your own fontie server that other people can use is undocumented right now.

Sending a request using cURL

The following was obtained from https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com/webfont-generator by clicking Generate & download your @font-face package and then opening the browser debugger to the network tab, right clicking the POST request, and choosing "copy as cURL":

curl 'https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com/fontie.server/package/' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' --compressed -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------286836418736644408031661354643' -H 'Origin: https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Referer: https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com/webfont-generator' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' --data-binary $'-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="font"\r\n\r\nfont_2c96d373-0dc3-4292-a288-5129f9774947\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\nwoff\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\nwoff2\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\notf\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="lang"\r\n\r\non\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="ranges"\r\n\r\n0020-007F,20AC\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="ranges"\r\n\r\n00A0-00FF\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="hinting"\r\n\r\nnohint\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nmetrics\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nglyphs\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nreferences\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nname\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="css"\r\n\r\ncreate\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="html"\r\n\r\ncreate\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643--\r\n'

Fontie runs on port 8000 by default. So we can modify this curl command by changing https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com/fontie.server/package/ to localhost:8000/package/ in order to send the command to my local fontie instance instead of the hosted one.

Also, the name="font"\r\n\r\nfont_2c96d373-0dc3-4292-a288-5129f9774947\r\n part referrs to a font which was previously uploaded.

in FontieFont.py you can see FONT_ROOT = "/tmp" and

    def open(self, id):
        path = os.path.join(FONT_ROOT, id)
        orig = "%s_orignal" % path

So it looks like the temporary file for the uploaded font is named /tmp/font_2c96d373-0dc3-4292-a288-5129f9774947_orignal when we are using the hosted https://fontie.pixelsvsbytes.com/webfont-generator server.

Therefore, in this example, we simply copy the desired font (ttf file, or other input font file) to that path:

cp ~/Desktop/fonts/Blackpine-4BEVW.ttf /tmp/font_2c96d373-0dc3-4292-a288-5129f9774947_orignal

We can also get rid of the not-needed http headers, yielding the following command:

curl -X POST -v 'localhost:8000/package/' -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------286836418736644408031661354643' --data-binary $'-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="font"\r\n\r\nfont_2c96d373-0dc3-4292-a288-5129f9774947\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\nwoff\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\nwoff2\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="output"\r\n\r\notf\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="lang"\r\n\r\non\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="ranges"\r\n\r\n0020-007F,20AC\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="ranges"\r\n\r\n00A0-00FF\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="hinting"\r\n\r\nnohint\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nmetrics\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nglyphs\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nreferences\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="fixes"\r\n\r\nname\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="css"\r\n\r\ncreate\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="html"\r\n\r\ncreate\r\n-----------------------------286836418736644408031661354643--\r\n'

While running, you may see some logs like

Internal Error (overlap) in u: Humph. This monotonic leads nowhere (81,137)->(81.0025,137.145).
Internal Error (overlap) in u: couldn't find a needed exit from an intersection
Internal Error (overlap) in u: Humph. This monotonic leads nowhere (127.473,235.473)->(127,237).
Internal Error (overlap) in u: couldn't find a needed exit from an intersection

Coming from the fontie server process. It may take a minute or two to finish.

When it ran successfully, this curl command returned:

{"package":"fontie_707d50ce-8998-4e85-b391-d788fe57c8d8"}

Finally, we can move the resulting folder to the desktop like so:

mv /tmp/fontie_707d50ce-8998-4e85-b391-d788fe57c8d8/fontie-package ~/Desktop/Blackpine-Processed

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Copyright 2013-2021 Torben Haase <https://pixelsvsbytes.com>