Finding a typeface by its character, and shipping it

osy font find "<character>" [--limit <n>] [--json] · osy font add --fontsource <id> [--weight 400,700] [--style italic] [--subset <subset>]

`osy font find` searches ~1,900 open-source families by what they are like — calm, playful, geometric, humanist, a didone, handwritten — and shows each one's weights and licence. `osy font add --fontsource <id>` fetches the one you chose, vendors it into the project with its licence, and pins it, under the family's real name.

Summary#

Choosing a face on purpose ("a rounded geometric sans for both", "a high-contrast didone over a grotesque" — [[ui-design#direction]]) needs a catalogue you can ask by character, and shipping it needs the file and its licence in your project. osy font find is the first; osy font add --fontsource is the second. Nothing is downloaded by hand, and the CSS family name is the catalogue's, never a guess from a file name.

Signature#

osy font find "<character>" [--limit <n>] [--json]
osy font add --fontsource <id> [--weight 400,700] [--style italic] [--subset <subset>] [--axis opsz] [--family "<name>"]

Description#

Finding a face#

Give it the words you would use about the face. Each word is matched against the family's name, its category (serif, sans, display, handwriting, monospace) and its character — Google Fonts' own classification, which scores every Google family 0–100 on qualities such as Calm, Playful, Sophisticated, Vintage, Futuristic and on kinds such as Geometric, Humanist, Grotesque, Rounded, Didone, Slab, Handwritten. Families with every word come first, strongest first:

$ osy font find "rounded geometric"
╭───────────┬──────────────┬──────────────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────────────────╮
│ Family    │ --fontsource │ Weights          │ Licence │ Why                                   │
├───────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Comfortaa │ comfortaa    │ 300–700 variable │ OFL-1.1 │ Sans/Rounded 100 · Sans/Geometric 100 │
│ Fredoka   │ fredoka      │ 300–700 variable │ OFL-1.1 │ Sans/Rounded 100 · Sans/Geometric 100 │
│ Quicksand │ quicksand    │ 300–700 variable │ OFL-1.1 │ Sans/Rounded 100 · Sans/Geometric 100 │
╰───────────┴──────────────┴──────────────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────────────────╯
  Ship one: osy font add --fontsource comfortaa — its files and its licence, pinned.

A family that matched only some words says how many ((1/2)). A family outside Google Fonts has no character scores and is found by its name and category only. The catalogue comes from Fontsource and the character scores from Google Fonts' published tag file; both are kept in ~/.osy/fonts/ for a day, and an unreachable source answers from the last copy, saying how old it is. --json prints the matches for a tool.

Shipping it#

$ osy font add --fontsource fraunces
✓ Registered Fraunces (7f9d191d9993…) → model/fonts/fraunces-latin-variable-normal.woff2 — a variable font, weights 100–900
  …
  From Fontsource (OFL-1.1); its licence is beside it as fraunces-LICENSE.txt — keep it with the font.

A family that has a variable file arrives as that one file, covering every weight it has. A family without one arrives as a file per weight — 400 and 700 unless --weight names others (--weight 300,500,800, which also asks for static files of a variable family). --style italic takes the italic, --subset a character set other than the family's own (usually latin; latin-ext for more European letters). The project is the current one, or the folder given after the options.

A family drawn with more than a weight axis — an optical size (Inter, Fraunces), a width, a slant — has a second variable file that carries it. --axis opsz (or wdth, slnt, full for every axis) takes that file instead:

$ osy font add --fontsource inter --axis opsz
✓ Registered Inter (2c295d99e26d…) → model/fonts/inter-latin-opsz-variable-normal.woff2 — a variable font, weights 100–900

With the optical-size axis in the file the browser draws large text in the family's display cut and small text in its text cut by itself, and fontVariationSettings: "'opsz' 32" sets it by hand. Without it both do nothing, and nothing says so — which is why the axis is asked for by name and a family that has no such file is refused rather than given its weight-only one.

What happens next is exactly web fonts — shipping a typeface with your app: the file is pinned in osyrin.lock, every compile ships it, and the printed hint shows the Font { Sans = … } line that makes every control use it. The licence text is written beside the file — the full text when Fontsource publishes it, otherwise a note naming the licence and where the font came from.