Smith

smith is a Python-based framework for building, testing and maintaining WSI (Writing Systems Implementation) components such as fonts and keyboards. It is based on waf. Smith orchestrates and integrates various tools and utilities to make a standards-based open font design and production workflow easier to manage.

Building a font involves numerous steps and various programs, which, if done by hand, would be prohibitively slow. Even working out what those steps are can take a lot of work. Smith uses a dedicated file at the root of the project (the file is python-based) to allow the user to describe how to build the font. By chaining the different build steps intelligently, smith reduces build times to seconds rather than minutes or hours, and makes build, test, fix, repeat cycles very manageable. By making these processes repeatable, including for a number of fonts at the same time, your project can be shared with others simply, or - better yet - it can be included in a CI (Continuous Integration) system. This allows for fonts (and their various source formats) to truly be libre/open source software and developed with open and collaborative methodologies.

Smith is Copyright (c) 2011-2018 SIL International (www.sil.org) and is released under the BSD license.

Documentation

The manual (including a step-by-step tutorial) is in docs/smith. (to regenerate: cd docs/smith/ && ./build-docs.sh)

Installation

The standard pip install . will install just the smith packages and commands, but will not install all the other font tooling which smith will search for when smith configure is run. For complete font build environments there are two ready made options below, depending on interactive or CI use cases:

To get the complete toolchain, follow the more descriptive step-by-step guide on https://silnrsi.github.io/silfontdev/

Vagrant support VM images

The current VM (Virtual Machine) installation files (using Vagrant) are in vm-install. These files make it easier to use smith (and its various components) on macOS, Windows or Ubuntu. Simply copy the files to the root of your project and run vagrant up.

Docker image

The primary purpose of the Docker image is to provide a base for CI systems to have a complete smith build environment.

We will provide a publicly available image soon but in the meantime you need to build your own. You will need to run docker build . in the top-level source dir and this will download and build the latest dependencies for the smith font build environment and install the smith python packages from the source dir.

You need to install Docker: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/.

Windows users should also install Git4Windows and WSL2.

The Dockerfile can take the following build arg:
ubuntuImage: (default: "ubuntu:20.04")
The base image to build on. This does not need to be an official Ubuntu image, but can be an image built on Ubuntu. e.g. This is how the TeamCity build agent image is generated.

The Docker file has the following terminal targets which can be selected with the --target option:
build-agent:
Stops the dockerfile just before it adds packages to support interactive use, suitable for non-interactive environments such as CI.
interactive: (default)
This will install a builder user who has pasword-less sudo, and the less, bash_completion, vim and nano packages. Suitable for development testing and as a clean room local build environment.

Thus to build the interactive image (and tag it smith:latest) run:

$> docker build . -t smith:latest

Or equivalently:

$> docker build --target=interactive . -t smith:latest

You can also tag it with a datestamp:

$> docker build . -t smith:20.04-$(date +%Y%W%w%H%M)

To get into the container while mapping volumes:

$> docker run --rm -it -h smith-focal -v $HOME/work/fonts:/smith smith:latest

This will run the latest version of smith in your local image store and run it with the absolute path (or docker volume) $WORKSPACE mapped to /smith inside, and an interactive bash session (the -it options). The --rm makes the container ephemeral.

Our TeamCity build agent is built like so:

$> docker build --build-arg=ubuntuImage="jetbrains/teamcity-agent" --target=build-agent .

We recommend using BuildKit, as it halves the build time with this Dockerfile. You can activate this by setting the Environment variable DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1, add it to .bashrc or .zshrc as an exported variable to make it permanent (see Docker documentation for extra details).

NOTE: there is a helper script called anvil.