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Iosevka Font Builder

Adam Kruszewski blogarrow-up-right

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Step by step guide in compiling a custom Iosevka font on Ubuntu/Debian

posted on 2019-10-27

My last postarrow-up-right on how to build a custom Iosevka font got completely out of date as Iosevka changed the build system and moved away from Makefiles. I thought I’ll write an update with additional step-by-step guide on how to make it work on more popular GNU/Linux distribution - Ubuntu (it is pretty straightforward on Arch or Gentoo as every dependency can be installed by distro’s package/port manager).

2019-10-27-iosevka.png

Custom Iosevka font you can have today!

Through the whole guide I assume we’ll clone most of the repositories used inside ~/Src/opensource/ directory.

* EDIT *

Just use the main workspace folder in gitpod.io. For example, in this case it is /workspace/iosevka-font-builder

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Install dependenciesarrow-up-right

There are three major dependencies for building Iosevka, NodeJS/NPM and ttfautohint are available as binaries in Ubuntu/Debian repositories so it is quite easy to install them running the following from terminal:

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Build and compile premake5 for otfccarrow-up-right

Otfcc requires premake5 build system to build and we need to compile it from sources:

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Build otfccarrow-up-right

We’ll not install premake system-wide, just execute it from otfcc’s source directory and build otfcc’s binaries.

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Clone Iosevka repositoryarrow-up-right

Now we can finally clone Iosevka’s source repository.

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Install nodeJs dependenciesarrow-up-right

Node package manager will take care of last set of dependencies needed.

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Create a custom build plan for Iosevka fontarrow-up-right

Now create a private-build-plans.toml file with the contents below inside Iosevka’s source directory. You can tweak look for each of the available options - please refer to official Iosevka readmearrow-up-right to see what options are available. The ones below are what I’m using and reflect what you could see on the picture at the beginning of this post.

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private-build-plans.toml

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My private-build-plans.toml

I put this file in the /workspace/iosevka-font-builder directory as well as the /workspace/iosevka-font-builder/iosevka directory.

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(optional) Add legacy support for ligaturesarrow-up-right

For use with Emacs. If you use an editor with Open Ligatures support (basically all of them nowadays) or are just not interested in ligatures at all - skip this step. If you want legacy ligature support built in simply append lines below to parameters.toml in Iosevka’s source code directory (credits goes to Soham Chowdhuryarrow-up-right).

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parameters.toml

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Build the iosevka fontarrow-up-right

Finally we can build the font. Just for the build step run we’ll add otfcc’s binary path to the $PATH variable, for npm to find it. Go grab some coffee as it might take a while.

I had to install node lts/fermium using nvm to get the font to build

ALSO: I had to reduce the number of concurrent processes on gitpod. I added this to the command: --jCmd=<number of processes>

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Install the fontarrow-up-right

The last step is to install the font, a shortcut from using your desktop’s font manager is just to copy the fonts where font-config can find them and invalidate its cache.

That’s all, custom Iosevka build should be available as “Iosevka Custom” now. Happy hacking!

About me:

I'm software architect and engineer with 20+ years of experience. Love coding and problem solving. CTO and co-founder of RevDeBugarrow-up-right.

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