this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.