Snort a Sprocket

Inconsolata

mid-morning
20 May 2009
(44 days ago)

Recently, Dan Benjamin wrote an excellent review of 10 monospaced typefaces for programming work. Since reading that article, I’ve downloaded and fallen in love with his top pick, Inconsolata. I’ve put it on both of my Macs at home and use it as the default font in iTerm, as well as for the Bland theme in Colloquy.

Today, I’ve packaged it for Foresight Linux.

The Conary Recipe

The Conary recipe to package the font is laughably simple:

(Yes, that’s Inconsolata in GNOME terminal.)

When the font is installed, Conary will automatically update the X11 font cache so you can use the font immediately. However, my recipe doesn’t mention anything about updating the cache post-install. This is because Conary uses dynamic tags and tag scripts that know to rebuild the cache after a set of files tagged as cacheable-font are updated or removed. Furthermore, I didn’t have to tell my recipe to tag the font file as cacheable-font. That gets set on the file during the cook process, as the tag handler specification already knows that any file installed in /usr/share/fonts gets tagged as cacheable-font.

tl;dr

To try this excellent font out on Foresight, just run sudo conary update font-opentype-inconsolata=smerp.rpath.org@fl:2. I recommend trying it out in GNOME Terminal at 12pts.

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