Font patcher for powerline that patches BDF and PSF fonts

Installation

To work with this font patcher you need the following python packages:

• Python image library or Pillow.

• bdflib. Note that installation from pip is currently broken, use

    pip install --user git+https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/bdflib.git
  

  Optional, you don't need it unless you want to patch bdf font.

• fontforge python bindings

The following software is required for patchdir.sh to work. It is optional but highly recommended.

• bdftopcf and pcf2bdf CLI tools
• psftools, namely psf2txt and txt2psf utilities
• coreutils, zcat, bzip2 and any POSIX-compatible shell (busybox is known to work)

Patching

Patching is done either manually for one font, like this:

zcat font.pcf.gz | pcf2bdf | python fontpatcher.py | bdftopcf | gzip > font-patched.pcf.gz

or using patchdir.sh script which will do this for you:

sh patchdir.sh -f target-directory font.pcf.gz

(will create file target-directory/font.pcf.gz). To copy directory and patch fonts in it use

sh patchdir.sh source-directory target-directory

. This will copy all files from source-directory to target-directory. Files ending with .pcf will be transformed into BDF files, patched and then transformed back, similar for .psf files (but they are transformed to TXT), .bdf ones will be patched, .gz or .bz2 files are first uncompressed and then compressed back in the target directory. Files in source directory are not modified. Behavior in case source and target directories are the same directories is undefined, but you will likely just get a bunch of errors and corrupt or empty font files.

Additional requirements

If BDF font does not claim that it is written for ISO10646 encoding it will not be patched. It may not claim they are written for any encoding at all though.

For TXT fonts must also claim they are using unicode. This is recognized by Flags: field set to 1 (see man txt2psf). Only PSF2 fonts are supported. Also note that you will likely need to replace some glyphs: putfont refuses to load font if there are more then 512 glyphs in it. For this job patchfont.sh and fontpatcher.py provide additional arguments:

zcat psf-font.psf.gz | psf2txt | python fontpatcher.py txt 'AB;AC;AD'

or

sh patchdir.sh -a 'AB;AC;AD' source-directory target-directory

or

sh patchdir.sh -a 'AB;AC;AD' -f target-directory psf-font*

will replace glyphs with codepoints AB, AC and AD (patchdir determines font format based on extension). For BDF fonts replacing is not supported.