Generate SelfContained Font Kits

[ramnathv]

Here is a rough sketch of how I think this could work

1. Download the fontkit
2. Convert font urls to data uris
3. Save as stylesheet.

[ramnathv]

The idea would be to create a payload and expand it to a css file using a mustache template (which you can see below. Let me illustrate with an example. The make_dataURI function encodes a font file in base64. The make_fonts function takes a fonts list and generates a css file.

make_dataURI <- function(font){
  font$dataURI = base64enc::dataURI(font$file,
    mime = sprintf('data:application/x-font-', font$format)
  )
  return(font)
}

make_fonts <- function(fonts, template, destfile = 'fonts.css'){
  fonts <- lapply(fonts, make_dataURI)
  css = paste(capture.output(cat(whisker.render(template, list(fonts = fonts)))), collapse = "\n")
  cat(css, file = destfile)
 return(css)
}

fonts = list(
  list(name = 'Open Sans', weight = 400, style = normal, format =  'wott', file = 'Open Sans.wott'),
  list(name = 'PT Sans', ...)
)
make_fonts(fonts)

Here is the mustache template to use.

{{# fonts }}
@font-face {
  font-family: '{{{ name }}}';
  font-style: {{{ style }}};
  font-weight: {{{ weight }}};
  src: url({{{ dataURI }}}) format('{{{ format }}}');
}
{{/ fonts }}

[seankross]

Thanks for the outline! I'll get to work on this.

[seankross]

I hope to have something viable tomorrow but you can track the progress here: https://github.com/seankross/cosmofont

[ramnathv]

This is looking good. A few ideas

1. It would be reasonable to assume that the fonts are downloaded from Google Fonts. Can you check if the downloaded font files have a pattern in their names that will allow automatic extraction of features.
2. It would be good to allow the users the option of either generating a style.css that links to the fonts locally, or one with fonts encoded in base64. This would require minimal changes to the code.

[seankross]

By using the Google Fonts API and including httr as a dependency I believe I can include functionality where a user can specify the name, weight, and style of a Google Font so that cosmofont can GET the font from Google and either create the appropriate data uri or include the corresponding .woff file with style.css.

[ramnathv]

Oh that would be brilliant! Nice idea.

[ramnathv]

And another note. Make yourself the author and maintainer, since you are doing all the hard work. You can add me as a contributor.

[seankross]

Will do, but this couldn't have happened without you!

[seankross]

Let me know if this works for you: https://github.com/seankross/cosmofont

You can install cosmofont with:

library(devtools)
install_github("cosmofont", "seankross")

Any comments or questions about the code, API, documentation, or anything else are welcome!