marnen/borg-sans-mono

Provide italic and bold .ttf in releases

Opened this issue · 10 comments

Provide italic and bold .ttf in releases

Not a bad idea. @charJe Do you want to make a pull request?

I would have no idea how to build them. I just know italics and bold don't work properly for me with fonts that don't have separate italics and bold .tff.

As far as I can tell, Droid Sans Mono only exists in one style (Droid Sans Mono Pro has a bold version, but that's not OSS and therefore I wouldn't be able to modify it without permission). Some font rendering systems can synthesize italic and bold versions, but not all can.

While it might be a useful exercise, I doubt that I have the time or the type design skill to draw a bold or italic version of all of Droid Sans Mono. However, if you know of such a version that exists already under a suitable license (or are willing to produce one), we can certainly add the ligatures to it.

That is too bad. I wonder if it would be possible to have one of those rendering systems synthesize an italic and bold version then save it to a .ttf

There’s probably a utility that can do that. Feel free to try! If you get a usable font out of it, we can put it in the repo.

Must to my surprise, I was able to make a bold, italic, and italic bold versions of Borg Sans Mono. They look good and are monospaced, but I cannot test the ligatures because I don't have them working right now. I only have .sfd and .ttf files, neither of which I see in this repository. How should I give them to you?

.sfd is perfect—it’s one of FontForge’s native file types. If you can open the .sfd file in FontForge and convert to sfdir, which is what I’ve been using here, that would be ideal, but if not, you could make a pull request with the .sfd files.

@charJe Out of curiosity, how did you produce the extra styles?

I opened the original font in FontForge and used Element > Style > Italic and Element > Style > Change Weight and I had to adjust some letters manually (mainly i and lowercase L). To guarantee they remained monospace I had to use Metrics > Set Width to 1229.

Cool, I forgot that FontForge had that feature. Thanks.

@charJe I see that you've opened #17 for this. In future, when you open a pull request that's related to an existing issue, please mention one in the other, so that GitHub can properly link them.