Provide single font with custom glyphs only for Fontconfig aliasing

[mbirth]

Please provide an all-in-one font with only the custom glyphs so it can be used with Fontconfig aliasing.

This is much easier than patching all fonts.

[ryanoasis]

Yes you are right in many cases this would be ideal. 👍

Fontconfig unfortunately I was not aware of when I started on this journey ☺️ but we should provide something even with a font patcher and providing patched fonts 😄

[be5invis]

And yes, providing a “custom-only” font file (in ttf) is extremely useful for users to patch their own fonts.

[lcorsini]

Made another try today at getting my fonts working right, and I think that on linux this would be the best approach.
Actually patched fonts look blurry and incorrectly sized (correctly sized characters, but insanely small glyphs) on my machine (arch linux currently and on terminator) fallback fontconfig seems to work great, but it's not perfect:
Using an already powerline-patched font for example (I use Terminess powerline)

• in vim-devicons some glyphs are misplaced because patching moves them to different places.
  
• the same happens with font-linux that clashes with FontAwesome in it's original form so font-linux glyphs aren't available
  

ATM using a non powerline font (original Terminus, I still love that font!) and having devicons and fontawesome fallback somehow works but the situation is not perfect
Also some other projects like vim-airline or zsh's powerlevel9k need to be worked out because of different glyphs used so:

A common "glyph-library" that could be used in fallback or for a easier patching could be easier to maintain and also could be shared and supported by other projects

[lcorsini]

Ok,
I've found a partial solution, if you use fontconfig fallback with a complete mono font it works.
Right now in my .fonts I have the patched Shure Tech Mono and my terminal is configured to use Terminus.
If I need a glyph fontconfig takes it from Shure Tech Mono, the only downside is that the glyphs are a little smaller.

To use powerlever9k I made a fork available here: https://github.com/lcorsini/powerlevel9k
where I created a new option for POWERLEVEL9K_MODE named nerdfont-fontconfig
so in .zshrc you need to put POWERLEVEL9K_MODE='nerdfont-fontconfig' to use the correct glyphs

[ryanoasis]

@lcorsini

but insanely small glyphs

Just curious were you using the fonts from the 0.9.0 branch ? Because a lot of the size issues have been fixed.

Yeah so the main problem with this patching is that with conflicts some glyph set is going to "win" and another has to "lose" and it seemed like a good choice for font awesome to "win" these conflicts and so the font linux and any other that conflict get moved.

A common "glyph-library" that could be used in fallback or for a easier patching could be easier to maintain and also could be shared and supported by other projects

Yeah I agree this would be awesome and I would like that library to be Nerd Fonts 😊 but the project has been mostly focused on patching and not creating a fontconfig. I would love to have a fontconfig available on Nerd Fonts but I just haven't gotten around to it.

To use powerlever9k I made a fork available here: https://github.com/lcorsini/powerlevel9k

lookin' good 👍

[lcorsini]

Just curious were you using the fonts from the 0.9.0 branch ? Because a lot of the size issues have been fixed.

Yes I'm using the 0.9.0 branch, today I'll try a different fallback font (I choose ShureTechMono), my impression is that fontconfig tries to match the dimension of the current font so maybe the one I'm using is smaller than my current font at 12pt.
I'll try different ones and see what fits better
EDIT
Ok using a different font is better, here is ShureTechMono as fallback:

And here used Roboto

which is better

Yeah I agree this would be awesome and I would like that library to be Nerd Fonts 😊 but the project has been mostly focused on patching and not creating a fontconfig. I would love to have a fontconfig available on Nerd Fonts but I just haven't gotten around to it.

Well I think that a consolidated glyph library could help your project AND fontconfig.
it's probably easier to patch a font using one source instead of multiple (so one nerdfont.otf instead of devicons+font-linux+fontawesome+pomodoro+octicons) and that file could be used for font fallback whitout much effort, also it could be cleaned up a little (there is some duplicate in your approach)
It's probably a bigger effort, but could repay in the longtime.

To use powerlever9k I made a fork available here: https://github.com/lcorsini/powerlevel9k
lookin' good 👍

Thanks, also speaking with vim-airline guys I was able to fix the last problem with vim (see here vim-airline/vim-airline#1320) the correct column number font (or maxlinenr)
if someone had the same problem as me

[ryanoasis]

Very much a WIP. I am new to fontconfig.. but just pushing up as I work on it

Edit the WIP: 3b5dff7

[msva]

@ryanoasis and what do you think about:

1. removing some duplicate glyphs (for example, it is multiple octocat faces, tuxes, win10 flags, ...), including multiple-sized (npm, octocat silhouette, drupal, CC, tablet and smartphone (that ones has microscopic clone-glyphs)). And maybe even give their place to, say, font-linux glyphs, to not move them so far
2. maybe dropping some logo glyphs, that is impossible to read at terminal font sizes (9-11pt). Like that: (it is also microscopic smartphone/tablet glyphs here).
3. look how google guys did their Noto Color Emoji font, so it's glyphs can be rendered as colored even in terminals that don't support svgs (unlike Emoji One Colour font, which bundles SVGs in addition, so it is only firefox, who able to render them). And then add some colored versions in NerdSymbols too :)
4. providing something like all_chars.txt with all the characters that font contain (for testing purposes and ease the way to get their codes (to not scroll entire list in fontforge)).

// For example, I see in kfontview app that "linux-font" glyphs is somewhere "at the end", but I can't get their codes 😢

[ryanoasis]

@msva Thanks

1. That's a good point. I think it has been brought up before or at least I thought about it. Hmm I would say I am leaning toward not doing that because this is more of a grouping of different iconic fonts than it's own custom build (though there have been some custom additions or one-offs). However perhaps in a next major version we could consider this (e.g. v2.0)
2. My answer here kind of follows #1 I would prefer to leave them. the tablet phone one comes that way in the original glyph source.. maybe we could do some tweaks to maximize it but this would go beyond what anything we currently do.
3. Thanks I have seen the font before but haven't gone too far with color fonts (type3) or svg based ones. Yes colors would be really awesome! I agree
4. I am actually working on improving the test script to do something like this 😉 . Here is a peak:
   

[FranklinYu]

Hi everyone. I'm not very familiar with Fontconfig; is there any way to use fallback method on macOS like this?

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