Hello, for a few days I have been looking at how to make a git repository to store a free font so that everyone can use it, modify it and redistribute it, the thing is that many have different ways of distributing the source code, and it is not very clear how. Do it in a way that is similar to an open source program. The typography is being made with fontforge, what would be the most optimal way to distribute this font to make it open source?
Store the fontforge file and a Makefile to generate TTF and other formats in git and provide an archive with generated fonts as a release.
I’m not familiar with creating fonts specifically, but you’ll want to commit any resources necessary to recreate the font file, including any build scripts to help ease the process and instructions specifying compatible versions of tooling (FontForge in this case). Don’t include FontForge in the repository, of course.
The compiled font files should be under releases in GitHub for the repository.
Git isn’t generally meant for binary resources but as long as they’re not too large, they’ll be fine. You just may not have meaningful ways to compare changes easily.
I have more of a question than an answer - is the Monaspace repo a good example of how to do this properly, or a bad one?
This font was made with glyphr. In a conventional program (Let’s say that this program is made in C), for it to be considered open source, the c file that contains the code has to be distributed, outside of that, there is the compilation file and additionally a README, in fonts it is different, the majority use a different programming language from one to the other to create the typography, and the only way I see that a font made in fontforge can be considered open source is for it to be shared the sfd file that fontforge generates when saving the font, this file is editable in a code editor, not like other files such as otf or ttf, which are directly binary
It includes generated font files together with sources. There’s no point in storing them in VCS. Instead of this, the repo should contain scripts to generate font files from sources.
