Font package guidelines

This document covers proposed standards and guidelines on writing PKGBUILDs for Fonts.

Arch package guidelines

32-bit – CLR – CMake – Cross – DKMS – Eclipse – Electron – Font – Free Pascal – GNOME – Go – Haskell – Java – KDE – Kernel – Lisp – Meson – MinGW – Node.js – Nonfree – OCaml – Perl – PHP – Python – R – Ruby – Rust – Shell – VCS – Web – Wine

General guidelines

Package naming

TTF fonts: ttf-fontname
OTF fonts: otf-fontname

If the font is a variable font, add the suffix -variable.

Note: The package name should be entirely lowercase.

Package description

The package description should at least contain the word font and what type of font it is: sans-serif, serif or monospace.

Architecture

Fonts are architecture-independent. Use arch=(any).

Dependencies

Fonts do not depend on anything. Many packages in the repositories, however, include fontconfig and xorg-mkfontscale as dependecies. Those were required when font packages needed to use install scripts to update the font cache – a lot of duplicate work now done by pacman hooks. If you install fontconfig or xorg-mkfontscale, all existing fonts in /usr/share/fonts/ will be cached making it unnecessary to force people to use fontconfig or mkfontscale.

Provides

Many applications rely on the virtual package . If your font family meets the criteria, add .

Source

See whether a font is available from the following sources in this order:

a code hosting platform like GitHub or an official website
Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/download?family=Name
Font Squirrel, Font Library, FFonts, 1001 Fonts, 1001 Free Fonts, DaFont

The following sites are not recommended:

FontSpace (checksums change for unknown reasons)

Package

The following snippet is an example for an OTF font released under the OFL (SIL Open Font License):

The OFL is technically a custom license, so each font package's license file needs to be installed under .
If the font contains many font files, consider using instead of OTF for the destination directory.

Example packages

– split package with OTF, TTF and variable version

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