Merging Noto fonts

[rinigus]

As a part of the work on adding support of Mapbox GL tiles to OSM Scout Server, I had to face the problem of distributing fonts as well. To be able to merge all Noto fonts into a single stack, I wrote a small python script that did it. Its available at https://github.com/rinigus/mapbox-gl-fonts as fontimport.py. To run it, you would need PBF support for python, protoc and fontnik.

For Noto fonts import, it converts all Noto fonts separately into PBF-formatted glyphs collections and then iterates through all stack ranges, opens them up using known PBF format, and merges the glyphs from different PBFs in the order of given preference. As a result, I could ship my server having just a single Noto font and it seems to work correctly (although I am no expert in all used languages).

By using this approach you maybe able to drop having two fonts in your styles.

[rinigus]

closing to cleanup stale issues. reopen if there is any interest