Font Custom

As mentioned under Font Custom Icon Font in the Style Guide, Dataverse uses Font Custom to create custom icon fonts.

Previewing Icons

The process below updates a preview page that you can use to see how the icons look.

In scripts/icons/svg in the source tree, you can see the SVG files that the icons are built from.

Install Font Custom

You’ll need Font Custom and its dependencies installed if you want to update the icons.

Ruby Version

Font Custom is written in Ruby. Ruby 3.0 didn’t “just work” with FontAwesome but Ruby 2.7 was fine.

RVM is a good way to install a specific version of Ruby: https://rvm.io

Install Dependencies and Font Custom Gem

The brew commands below assume you are on a Mac.

brew tap bramstein/webfonttools
brew update
brew install woff2
brew install sfnt2woff
brew install fontforge
brew install eot-utils
gem install fontcustom

(brew install sfnt2woff isn’t currently listed in the FontCustom README but it’s in mentioned in https://github.com/FontCustom/fontcustom/pull/385)

If fontcustom --help works now, you have it installed.

Updating Icons

Navigate to scripts/icons in the source tree (or online) and you will find:

  • An svg directory containing the “source” for the icons.

  • Scripts to update the icons.

There is a copy of these icons in both the app and the guides. We’ll update the guides first because it’s much quicker to iterate and notice any problems with the icons.

Updating the Guides Icons

Run docs.sh and then open ../../doc/sphinx-guides/source/_static/fontcustom-preview.html in a browser to look at the icons. (This is the preview page mentioned above that gets incorporated in the next Sphinx build.)

Update any files in the svg directory and run the script again to see any differences.

Note that Font Custom creates font files with unique names. For this reason, we should remove the old files from git as we add the new ones. The script deletes the old files for you but in a step below we’ll do a git add to stage this change.

Updating the App Icons

Assuming you’re happy with how the icons look in the preview page in the guides, you can move on to updating the icons in the Dataverse app itself.

This time the script is called app.sh and it works the same way with the addition of tweaking some URLs. Go ahead and run this script and do a full “clean and build” before making sure the changes are visible in the application.

Committing Changes to Git

As mentioned above, icons are in both the app and the docs. Again, because the filenames change, we should make sure the old files are removed from git.

From the root of the repo, run the following:

git add doc/sphinx-guides/source/_static
git add src/main/webapp/resources

That should be enough to make sure old files are replaced by new ones. At this point, you can commit and make a pull request.

Caveats About Font Custom

Font Custom is a useful tool and has an order of magnitude more stars on GitHub than its competitors. However, an issue suggests that the tool is somewhat abandoned. Its domain has expired but you can still get at what used to be its website at https://fontcustom.github.io/fontcustom/