Integrate with Fontship about fontsource

[alerque]

Thanks for the detailed response @DecliningLotus. I see I was under some misunderstanding about how fontsource works under the hood. I'll be getting back to this eventually with a more detailed proposal of how I envision closer integration could work.

[alerque]

Yes. Personal and local concerns have demanded that I clear out some FOSS time and I've been dodging all font related stuff for a while now. I'll jump back in as soon as I have the bandwidth and this is definitely still on my radar.

[ayuhito]

No worries then! Just a checkup while doing some repo cleanup. Thanks!

[ayuhito]

The idea to integrate Fontship with Fontsource is an interesting concept but I'm not wholly sure how that will pan out practically.
Exactly what would we be directly integrating?

Workflow

At first glance at least Fontsource appears to rely on upstream font projects committing font build artifacts to their Git repositories. This is a serious anti-pattern that I consider anathema, is finally starting to be discouraged by Google Fonts (one of the primary early drivers of this terrible workflow), and isn't even too kosher by GitHub TOS.

For Google Fonts, we rely on Google Font Metadata that automatically parses the Google Fonts Developer API and generates even more necessary datapoints by fetching their CSS API as well before aggregating it all into one file. This is automatically updated and checked on a weekly basis.

For all other fonts, it is manual implementation. I grab the latest release on their repository and after chucking their files through Fontsource's packagers to standardise it with the rest of our fonts, it is then published. Updating the fonts is also a manual process. You may consider that an anathema, but what do you suggest to change in our workflow that resolves that?

In the long term, I do want to look into automating as much of this process as I can - but every repository seems to do things a little differently, needing a manual touch. Fontship running on all League fonts may prove to be beneficial as it would standardise how those fonts are published, although of course, I'd want to see a bit more widespread use of that before building automated scripts dedicated to that process.

Versioning

Versioning is an issue. I'm not too keen on the NPM packages being a miss-match for the actual font versions. I'm a firm SemVer supporter, but the font ecosystem is kind of limited by the OFF/M$OT specs that specify a two segment version string. For Fontship I am mandating the use of OpenFV compatible versioning. This is a lot better than many current font projects do, but still doesn't make to SemVer very consistently.

Versioning is an interesting topic with Fontsource. We follow a semblance of Semver but not a perfect rendition of it. A quick look at our changelog shows that major and minor updates are dependent on whether Fontsource updates its packaging methods. Patch updates, on the other hand, might be a mix of either Fontsource or an update from the source itself, which may potentially be a big change that we have no notice or control over.

However, we always also link the source version at the bottom of each package README as well, as seen here. I think that is the best compromise between managing Fontsource's and each individual source's versioning.

Packaging

What we don't do yet is generate any CSS templates to ease use as a webfont. I would be interested in hearing your suggestions on how that should be done, and also on generating NPM packaging.

Arguably... that is the whole purpose of Fontsource. We use lodash's template function to build the CSS whilst stuff like package.json is simply just exporting and writing an object. I do want to research that a little and see if there are better solutions for the sake of reliability and future maintenance, but it isn't a too high priority task currently.

[stale]

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[alerque]

Nope not stale, still working on this.

[ayuhito]

Hiya @alerque, are you still interested in pursuing this? Just checking in as it's been around 6 months since the last discussion.

[ayuhito]

Appreciate the original issue, but I think I'll close this issue to clean up some of the stale issues in this repository. If this ever comes to fruition, feel free to reopen or create a new issue!