custom fonts: better familly names

[frantisekhanzlikbl]

I'm trying to patch a custom build of Iosevka, but I keep failing to get predictable family names for the resulting patched files.

The original unpatched files have family set to iosevka polarised term:

$ otfinfo --info iosevka-polarised-term-regular.ttf
Family:              iosevka polarised term
Subfamily:           Regular
Full name:           iosevka polarised term
PostScript name:     iosevka-polarised-term
Preferred family:    iosevka polarised term

and as such, I'd expect the patched files to have their family set to the original family with something appended, e.g. iosevka polarised term NF or iosevka polarised term Nerd Font. instead, the patcher somehow magically generates IosevkaPolarisedTerm Nerd Font:

$ otfinfo --info IosevkaPolarisedTermNerdFontPlusFontLogosPlusMaterialDesignIcons-Regular.ttf
Family:              IosevkaPolarisedTerm Nerd Font
Subfamily:           Regular
Full name:           IosevkaPolarisedTerm Nerd Font
PostScript name:     IosevkaPolarisedTermNFLMDI
Preferred family:    IosevkaPolarisedTerm Nerd Font Plus Font Logos Plus Material Design Icons

I have no idea where it took IosevkaPolarisedTerm from, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere in the original font's metadata. I tried using all --makegroups 0–6, none of which seem to help (with 0 producing even worse output of iosevka Nerd Font, losing the rest of the family name somewhere). The preferred family is also absolutely horrendous, because that's what fontconfig (and everything that takes font names from it) reports it as, making the output mostly unreadable.

Therefore, I would therefore like to ask:

1. is this behaviour expected? is there a good reason for transforming the original family name instead of only appending to it?
2. if so, can I disable it somehow?
3. as a workaround, can I somehow force a different family name?

Thanks in advance.

[Finii]

Lets see what I can answer

1a) Yes. The original name is always CamelCased and blanks removed. Then the "Nerd Font" stuff is appended. For example JetBrains Mono becomes JetBrainsMono Nerd Font.
1b) I do not know the reason for this.
2) There is makegroups -1 which prevents any renaming. But then the original name is kept and nothing is appended.
3) Maybe --name is what you want?

Remarks:
--makegroups 0 is just for people that want to have the years old buggy behaviour, which is deprecated and should not be used. The legacy code is still in and can be selected, but it will be removed somewhen (and then there is no 0 anymore).

[frantisekhanzlikbl]

Welp, that explains it. Turns out, my distro packages an old version of the patcher. I'll go fix that and implement the case transformation as a workaround for now. Thank you so much for your time!

Do you think it would be worth it to mention the transformation somewhere in the docs? If so, would you accept a PR? Which files should I mention it in? Also, should I update the "Full options:" section in readme to include the --name flag?

[Finii]

Well, v4.4.0is the patcher released with Nerd Fonts v3.0.1.

It is just that docker and zip get updated everytime something is pushed to the default branch, i.e. they follow HEAD commit by commit.

It is always good to improve the documentation :-) And of course a PR is welcome. But I have no clue where to mention it.

The full options section is updated on Nerd Font releases, which is not that often (the release date for Nerd Fonts v3.1.0 is only some month overdue 😬 (*)

I'm not so sure the web page should show HEAD options, because a lot of people use the release version and strictly speaking that feature has not yet been released, so it should not be mentioned?

So usually I update the readme and the gh_pages only on (real) releases.
If someone has a HEAD patcher they should use --help.

Not really decided here, but leaning towards not-mentioning.

(*) There are some bugs I had hoped to fix but lacked the time to really solve, all of course Windows related ;-)

[frantisekhanzlikbl]

With some effort, I managed to use the --name flag on 3525912.

090fbbe (master) kept erroring out for one of the iosevka files:

  File "/nix/store/16s7v2fxdm3k8cq321bvivnldhyq0mr8-nerd-font-patcher-4.5.2/bin/.nerd-font-patcher-wrapped", line 2052, in <module>
    main()
  File "/nix/store/16s7v2fxdm3k8cq321bvivnldhyq0mr8-nerd-font-patcher-4.5.2/bin/.nerd-font-patcher-wrapped", line 2043, in main
    patcher.setup_font_names(f)
  File "/nix/store/16s7v2fxdm3k8cq321bvivnldhyq0mr8-nerd-font-patcher-4.5.2/bin/.nerd-font-patcher-wrapped", line 746, in setup_font_names
    n.rename_font(font)
  File "/nix/store/16s7v2fxdm3k8cq321bvivnldhyq0mr8-nerd-font-patcher-4.5.2/bin/../lib/name_parser/FontnameParser.py", line 301, in rename_font
    self.check_weights(font)
  File "/nix/store/16s7v2fxdm3k8cq321bvivnldhyq0mr8-nerd-font-patcher-4.5.2/bin/../lib/name_parser/FontnameParser.py", line 289, in check_weights
    if abs(os2_weight - ps_weight) > 50 or abs(os2_weight - name_weight) > 50:
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'int' and 'NoneType'

Unfortunately, even with the --name flag, the family name gets transformed to camel case (even though the spaces are kept). it does prevent the preferred family to be set, though, which is most of the way to what I need, so I'll stick with that.

Thanks again for the help. I'll put a note about the case transformation somewhere in the docs and submit a PR.

[Finii]

I will revisit the free-name-mechanism of --name. I just threw it in when implementing the name source selection stuff, without any concrete application and obviously not enough thought / energy.

Thanks for reporting the bug, will fix that also.

[Finii]

Maybe you can check #1364 with your iosevka variant? It should not error out anymore.
If not, maybe you can be more specific with the iosevka you used, so that I can reproduce and check the new code.