Confusion about instructions

[Jano-1]

I wanted to patch my own font, so from the instructions on the main page, I installed fontforge. Then going down the page a bit, it says:

Alternative usage: Execute the patcher with the FontForge binary using the script flag:

fontforge -script font-patcher PATH_TO_FONT

So I tried fontforge -script font-patcher PATH_TO_FONT because none of the other instructions were applicable to me. It didn't work. Looking around I saw someone who had the same issue and it turned out they didn't use an argument. So I added --complete. It didn't work. I went down to examples:

./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf
./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf -s -q
./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf --use-single-width-glyphs --quiet
./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf -w
./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf --windows --quiet
./font-patcher Droid\ Sans\ Mono\ for\ Powerline.otf --windows --pomicons --quiet

./font-patcher Inconsolata.otf --fontawesome
./font-patcher Inconsolata.otf --fontawesome --octicons --pomicons
./font-patcher Inconsolata.otf

./FontForge.AppImage -script /tmp/nerdfonts/font-patcher /tmp/nerdfonts/CascadiaMonoPL-Semibold.ttf --fontawesome -out /tmp
./FontForge.AppImage -script $PWD/font-patcher $PWD/CascadiaMonoPL-Semibold.ttf --octicons -out $HOME

docker run --rm -v ~/myfont/patchme:/in -v ~/myfont/patched:/out nerdfonts/patcher
docker run --rm -v ~/Desktop/myfont/patchme:/in -v ~/Desktop/myfont/patched:/out nerdfonts/patcher --fontawesome

None of these applied to me. Googling I finally found this page: https://github.com/alexandermckay/font-patcher
Following the instructions on that page I realized I had to have the src directory, and also the font-patcher file.

Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong? What I did isn't included anywhere on this repo. I'm confused.

[Finii]

Sorry that the documentation is that misleading :-(

Lets first solve your problem, then tackle correction of the documentation.

The Nerd Fonts font-patcher is a script that tells fontforge how to patch your font. In order to add some symbols to your font it also needs that symbols - these binary files are not included in the font-patcher script.

Preparation for self-patching

For most (all except the Container method) you need fontforge. How you can get this depends on your OS. If you use some Linux, most probably some version of fontforge is in your distributions package repository and can be installed by your normal software installation way. Otherwise, in my opinion it is best to follow their (fontforge's) installation instructions.
There are bugs in older versions - if you want to patch a very 'feature rich' font the patching might fail. Make sure to use at least the fontforge March 2022 Release in those cases.

Recommended way

Currently the recommended way to get the font-patcher script is the Release page. There is a special zip-archive that for that:
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases/download/2.2.0-RC/FontPatcher.zip

That zip file contains the script and the symbols. It has to be extracted to some directory and will put the symbol files (in form of symbol source fonts) in a sub-directory. The relative path between the script location and those files is hard-coded in the script (although it can be overridden for advanced usage).

Direct git access way

A good option, and needed if you want to patch with the most recent bugfixes applied (i.e. with HEAD), you need to download the font-patcher script directly from here and additionally all the content below src/glyphs/ (from here). It is a little bit hard(er) to download that many files manually, so this most likely is only a solution for you if you know how to work with git.
That files must be put in the prescribed relative-to-the-script sub-directory (i.e. src/glyphs/) or you have to specify the glyph directory in the font-patcher call.

Future simple way

There is a PR #741 that, if you start font-patcher and it can not find all the source glyphs, downloads them automatically for you. This is the most convenient maybe for users that just download the script from the front page.

Container way

There is a docker container prepared here. You need to have docker installed on you system and then you can patch your font in that container. (I never used that.) It contains (I believe) fontforge and the source symbols, so that is a one stop solution.

Actual patching

With everything downloaded and installed, the simplest way is on the command line to go in the same directory where font-patcher. I usually put the font-to-be-patched into the same directory. In principle font-patcher can be called on its own (and it will then call fontforge to do the actual patching) but for me this is not working very reliably on all platforms. A more robust way is to call fontforge from the command line and specify font-patcher as option (and fontforge will execute the script then).

cd wherever-font-patcher-is
./font-patcher --complete myfont.otf

[ ... or: ]

fontforge --script font-patcher --complete myfont.otf

You can give different options to the call, the most used are possibly --complete (patch in everything we have), and depending on your terminal emulation --mono. On MS Windows you might want to also specify --windows. The other options are seldom needed.

The patched font will be created in you current workdir.

The container solution is similar but slightly different, see the manual on dockerhub.

---

For your concrete problems, what you do not say is how you got font-patcher? And maybe you can tell us the messages you got. Most probably you just downloaded the script file (font-patcher) and (or course!) not the src/glyphs/ directory.

[Jano-1]

Thanks a lot for your detailed instructions, they are much appreciated. I got everything to work and patched the fonts successfully. Thank you!