Installation#

• Enable bitmap fonts
• Install from release
• Build from source
• Verification
• Troubleshooting

Enable bitmap fonts#

If you are an Debian/Ubuntu based system, chances are bitmap fonts are disabled, go ahead and enable them:

sudo mv /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-* /etc/fonts/conf.avail/
sudo mv /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/

If you would like to disable them for some reason, simply move the files back back from /etc/fonts/conf.avail to /etc/fonts/conf.d.

Install from release#

1. Grab the latest release from the releases page.

2. Extract the release package:

tar xf scientifica-v1.2.tar.gz

3. You may install either the ttfs or the otbs or the bdfs

# ttfs are recommended
cp ttf/* ~/.local/share/fonts/

# but you may install the otbs if you want to
cp otb/* ~/.local/share/fonts

# bdfs are not recommended
cp bdf/* ~/.local/share/fonts

Build from source#

Requirements:

• java
• BitsNPicas
• fontforge
• python3

On Debian based distros, you can install all requirements via:

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jre python3 fontforge
curl -o BitsNPicas.jar "https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas/blob/master/downloads/BitsNPicas.jar"

1. Set an environment variable BNP to the path of BitsNPicas.jar, defaults to the current directory if unset

# for example:
user@host$ BNP="/home/nerdypepper/BitsNPicas.jar" ./build.sh

2. If everything went well, you will find the generated font files under the build folder.
3. Continue with step 3 of "Install from release"

Verification#

Check if your installation procedure was a success:

1. Run fc-list | grep scientifica
2. If the output is not null, congrats!
3. Proceed to Troubleshooting if the output is empty

Troubleshooting#

If your application does not recognize the font, you can try a couple of things:

• use ttf variant instead of the otb or bdf variants
• run fc-cache --really-force -v and verify again
• open an issue, I'd love to help you out!