Font Control

A font manager for keeping your font files up-to date

1. Distributed, plain & simple repository model
   1. There's a default, main repository of fonts that are free (as in free to distribute) that the working group hosts and maintains.
   2. Anyone can setup a repository; e.g. host fonts internally at your company and restrict access to people who have licenses for the fonts.
   3. A repository is just a set of files served over HTTP(S) and should be serviceable from any HTTP server (no dynamic content generation required.) E.g. AWS S3, GitHub, etc.
2. A small and portable program (fontctrl) that manages fonts on a computer and serves as the client for accessing repositories.
   1. Can be configured to operate on any number of repositories via a simple JSON configuration file (~/.fontctrl.json on Posix systems, )
   2. Memorizing the user's preference of fonts and any versions limitations (e.g. "inter-ui = 2.*")
   3. Keeps font files up to date according to the user's preference and availability in configured repositories, by

Long-term goal is to make it easy for designers to keep all their font files up to date, including updates to fonts they have purchased licenses for. Operation should be as automatic as possible, optimally operating without user intervention (e.g. via scheduled invocation or as a service.)

Currently supported systems:

• macOS

Font Repository

A font repository is a source for fonts served over HTTP.

Paths:

/index.json
# machine-readable index of the state of the repo

/<font-name>/<font-name>-<version>.zip
# archive containing the font files for <version> of <font-name>

/<font-name>/<font-name>-<version>.json
# description of <version> of <font-name>

Shape of /index.json:

{
  "fonts": {
    "<font-name>": {
      "name":     "<family-name>",
      "versions": [ "<version>" ]
    }
  }
}

Shape of /<font-name>/<font-name>-<version>.json:

{
  "version":     "<version>",
  "checksum":    "<sha1-checksum>",
  "name":        "<family-name>",
  "styles":      [ "<style>" ],

  "archive_url": "<archive_url>",
  "description": "<description>",
  "info_url":    "<info-url>",
  "authors":     [ "<author>" ],
  "license":     "<license>"
}

Parameters:

• <version> should be a SemVer formatted version string. E.g. "1.1.141+2013" If <version> is not in the SemVer format, it is interpreted as an opaque identifier. I.e. 2.003 < 2.004 => false but "2.003" == "2.003" => true.
• <font-name> should be a short name for the font using only the following characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _, . (regexp [A-Za-z0-9_\-\.]+) E.g. "inter-ui"
• <family-name> should be the human-readable name of the font family. This should match the typoFamilyName record of the font files' name tables. E.g. "Inter UI"
• <sha1-checksum> should be the hexadecimal representation of the SHA-1 checksum of the zip archive.
• <style> should be the same name as in the respective font file's typoSubfamilyName record of the name table. E.g. "Medium Italic".

Optional parameters:

• <archive_url> URL pointing to a font-file archive in an external location. Note that <sha1-checksum> must match the archive file even if it's served from an external location.
• <description> should be a human-readable description of the typeface.
• <info-url> a well-formed URL pointing to a resource with more information about the typeface.
• <author> should be the name (and optionally an electronic address) of a person or entity that is the (co-)author of the typeface.
• <license> should either be a copyright statement, a complete end-user license or a url to a complete end-user license for the font files.

Client configuration

fontctrl reads its configuration from a text file that you can edit to change what sources (repositories) your fonts are being installed from. fontctrl looks for the configuration file in the following locations, in order:

• ./.fontctrl.yml
• ./fontctrl.yml
• [macOS, linux] ~/.fontctrl.yml
• [windows] %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\fontctrl\fontctrl.yml

Shape of the configuration file:

font-dir: <font-dir>
repos:
  - url: <repo-url>
fonts:
  <font-name>: <font-version-pattern>
  <font-name>: <font-subscription>
    version: <font-version-pattern>
    styles: [ <font-style> ]

• repos contain an ordered listing of repositories from which to fetch fonts. A repo listed earlier takes precedence over a repo listed further down.
• <repo-url> should be fully-qualified URL to a repository
• <font-dir> is optional and when present overrides the file system location where fontctrl will install and manage local font files.
• fonts is the only required property and is the list of fonts you are subscribing to.
• <font-name> is the name of a font as used in repositories
• <font-version-pattern> is a semver version pattern declaring what versions of the font you are interested in. E.g. "2.*", "1.3.0-beta", ">=2.0", etc. An empty string or "*" means "most recent stable release". The special string "latest" means "most recent release", which included pre-releases.
• <font-subscription> can be used instead of just a version pattern to also limit font styles. <font-subscription>
• <font-style> case-insensitive name of a specific style, e.g. "bold", "medium italic". When styles are specified, only those styles will be installed and managed. (this is not yet implemented; may never be.)

Note: In the future, the configuration file will be expanded to include account identity for accessing restricted repositories.

Example:

font-dir: ~/Library/Fonts/fontctrl
repos:
  - url: https://fontctrl.org/fonts/
fonts:
  inter-ui: ">=2.*"

Building & developing

[Posix]

First-time setup:

$ ln -s /abs/path/to/misc/fontctrl.json ~/.fontctrl.json
$ ./init.sh

Build:

$ client/build.sh
$ ./build/fontctrl version

Run unit tests:

$ client/test.sh