Load fonts from external folder

[deadnews]

Expected behavior of the wanted feature

Option like --sub-file-paths=, but for fonts folders.

For example:
sub-file-paths=subs:/or/absolute/path/to/
font-file-paths=subs/fonts:/or/absolute/path/to/

ffmpeg has similar functionality:
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#subtitles-1

11.201 subtitles
Draw subtitles on top of input video using the libass library. 
...
fontsdir
    Set a directory path containing fonts that can be used by the filter. These fonts will be used in addition to whatever the font provider uses.

[guidocella]

You can already load fonts from ~/.config/mpv/fonts, or do you want to customize that directory?

[deadnews]

Yes, I can load fonts from specific folders like ~/.fonts/, but required fonts for subtitles are in the subs/fonts folder I just downloaded.

1. How will the fonts appear in specific folders if I don't copy them (or create a symlink) beforehand?
2. Why do I need these fonts in specific folders all the time, if they are needed only during viewing with specific subtitles?

I want to be able to set a directory for loading additional fonts like in the ffmpeg example above.

[snylonue]

https://github.com/yzwduck/FontLoaderSub
might be of some help

[hooke007]

recently the update of mpc remind me of this feature , unfortunately it hasn't been implemented in mpv.

[GribanovIvan]

Be really good just load fonts from SUBDIR/fonts with ignoring capitalization letters for "fonts" dir

[fbriere]

To anyone interested, I have submitted PR #9856, which adds a --sub-fonts-dir option (along with its corresponding --osd-fonts-dir).

For the record, libass (which is in charge of loading the fonts) only supports a single directory¹, thus precluding a plural "paths" option.

Furthermore, since there's already a default location (~~/fonts), automatically selecting another one based on the presence or absence of a directory (as suggested by @GribanovIvan) would unfortunately be likely to break something. (That's too bad; I really liked the idea.) Thus, you will have to set the value yourself for each directory with use-filedir-conf or some other way².

¹ Despite what the documentation might seem to imply, this directory is not searched recursively, so we can't trick our way around this limitation.
² Not to toot my own horn, but my tree-profiles script can be rather useful in this situation.

[fbriere]

automatically selecting another one based on the presence or absence of a directory would unfortunately be likely to break something.

I feel a bit embarrassed for not thinking about it right away, but this is something a script could easily do. So I wrote sub-fonts-dir-auto, which does exactly that (i.e. pick any Fonts directory if present, ignoring capitalization).