Flatpak is broken, AUR package is unmaintained, no good way to install on Arch Linux—a build guide.

[ctrlcctrlv]

(Note: I contribute to FontForge, so readers should be aware of that bias.)

I use Arch Linux. It's a quite popular distro. There is seemingly no simple way to use Birdfont on Arch.

I'm currently debugging a particularly thorny FontForge bug (fontforge/fontforge#4173) and thought I'd give Birdfont a try, to see if it interprets the TTF within correctly, so I could compare your code to ours and track down the problem.

• The AUR package is broken and orphaned. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/birdfont
• The Flathub instructions do not work at all.

  [fred@pc ~]$ flatpak remote-add --from gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo
  error: Can't load uri https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo: Error resolving “sdk.gnome.org”: Name or service not known
  

• The build system seems obscure and downright dangerous to me. doit? install.py, in my opinion, screams, Yikes!, it literally runs ln in the shell, and install, and is entirely custom made, which unfortunately does not inspire my confidence. But, then again, the project is written in Vala of all things, so perhaps there's simply no other way™. build.py builds up a giant valac command, in a fashion similar to Autotools, I suppose.
  • Speaking of Autotools, you may have noticed there's a configure script. It is, again, custom, not in any way generated by Autotools.
• But anyway I run it. I have faith in its author ;-)
• Oh no, what's this??

  [fred@pc birdfont]$ build/bin/birdfont
  build/bin/birdfont: error while loading shared libraries: libbirdfont.so.36.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  

• Hmm... LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./birdfont ~/Downloads/kaiu-1558375.ttf
• Maybe it's missing its icons. So I cd back to the root and they appear. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=build/bin build/bin/birdfont ~/Downloads/kaiu-1558375.ttf
• OK, time for the big moment!
• Aw :disappointed: Seems Birdfont has same problem we do. At least I know it's quite widespread now. :)

[johanmattssonm]

Thank you for the report. Can you send me the find file (TTF or OTF). Cheers

[ctrlcctrlv]

No problem, here you go. I'm still investigating the issue myself, but am not getting anywhere and will probably give up soon. It works fine in FreeType, but neither FontForge nor Birdfont understands it. Inkscape also chokes on it. It also works on OS X and Windows, I'm told.

kaiu-1558375.zip

[johanmattssonm]

Hi. I have update the flatpak. I hope the new version works (3.33.1). Please let me know if you find errors.

[johanmattssonm]

The binary build/bin/birdfont binary needs libraries in build/bin. You should run birdfont.sh from the project directory.