font-install

font-install is a cross-platform utility to install fonts on a system.

It can install fonts on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or Windows systems. Given a ZIP file, it will even install all font files within the archive. If you feed font-install an HTTP/HTTPS URL, it will first download the file, then install the font (or extract and install them if the file is a ZIP file). font-install currently only handles OpenType and TrueType font files.

font-install is not intended to handle webfonts; it installs fonts so that other applications can use (such as your display manager, office suite, etc.). It currently installs fonts into the system's user-specific fonts library location.

Background

I have a list of fonts that I always want installed on my computer, no matter which operating system that computer runs. On Linux, this evolved into a simple bash script, which also worked well for OSX (after fudging the install path). Both of these operating systems simply look for font files in a specific location (on Linux, ${HOME}/.local/share/fonts; for OSX it is ${HOME}/Library/Fonts). However, I also wanted to be able to install these same fonts just as easily on Windows...which is quite not as easy. (It's still pretty easy, though.)

Enter font-install: a tool that will download, extract, and install fonts the exact same way no matter which OS I'm on.

Requirements

This code requires at least Go 1.18 to build.

Installation

You can find the latest release on the releases page for many platforms. For other platforms, you may install from source like so:

$ go install github.com/Crosse/font-install@latest

Usage

General usage details:

Usage of font-install:
  -debug
        Enable debug logging
  -dry-run
        Don't actually download or install anything
  -fromFile string
        text file containing fonts to install

Examples

Download and install the Source Sans Pro font from Font Squirrel:

$ font-install http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/source-sans-pro
Downloading font file from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/source-sans-pro
Skipping non-font file "SIL Open Font License.txt"
==> Source Sans Pro Black
==> Source Sans Pro Black Italic
==> Source Sans Pro Light
==> Source Sans Pro Light Italic
==> Source Sans Pro Italic
==> Source Sans Pro Semibold
==> Source Sans Pro Semibold Italic
==> Source Sans Pro ExtraLight
==> Source Sans Pro ExtraLight Italic
==> Source Sans Pro
==> Source Sans Pro Bold
==> Source Sans Pro Bold Italic
Installed 12 fonts

This downloads the source-sans-pro ZIP archive from Font Squirrel, extracts all of the fonts, and installs them into the user's fonts directory.

Download and install Chopin Script from dafont.com and enable debug output:

$ font-install -debug 'http://dl.dafont.com/dl/?f=chopin_script'
Installing font from http://dl.dafont.com/dl/?f=chopin_script
Downloading font file from http://dl.dafont.com/dl/?f=chopin_script
Detected content type: application/zip
Scanning ZIP file for fonts
==> ChopinScript
Installing "ChopinScript" to /Users/seth/Library/Fonts/ChopinScript.otf
Installed 1 fonts

Install a font file you have stored locally on your file system:

$ ls *.ttf
OpenSans-Bold.ttf    OpenSans-Italic.ttf  OpenSans-Regular.ttf

$ font-install *.ttf
==> Open Sans Bold
==> Open Sans Italic
==> Open Sans
Installed 3 fonts

Feed font-install a list of fonts to install via a text file:

$ font-install -fromFile example.txt
Downloading font file from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/Inconsolata
Skipping non-font file "SIL Open Font License.txt"
Downloading font file from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/dejavu-sans
Skipping non-font file "DejaVu Fonts License.txt"
==> DejaVu Sans Oblique
==> DejaVu Sans Condensed Oblique
==> DejaVu Sans ExtraLight
==> DejaVu Sans
==> DejaVu Sans Condensed
==> DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold
==> DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold Oblique
==> DejaVu Sans Bold
==> DejaVu Sans Bold Oblique
Downloading font file from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/dejavu-sans-mono
Skipping non-font file "DejaVu Fonts License.txt"
==> DejaVu Sans Mono Bold Oblique
==> DejaVu Sans Mono
==> DejaVu Sans Mono Oblique
==> DejaVu Sans Mono Bold
[...]
Downloading font file from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/ubuntu-mono
Skipping non-font file "UBUNTU FONT LICENCE.txt"
==> Ubuntu Mono
==> Ubuntu Mono Italic
==> Ubuntu Mono Bold
==> Ubuntu Mono Bold Italic
Downloading font file from http://fontawesome.io/assets/font-awesome-4.7.0.zip
not a font: font-awesome-4.7.0.zip
Installed 72 fonts

The above output also shows how font-install handles errors. (In this case, the URL is incorrect.)

Crosse / font-install