fontconfig on windows troubles with solution

[chrismaster]

While trying to get some kind of dev environment on my windows pc for #19 , I struggled with fontconfig.
fontconfig seems to be an os dependency and you have to install it, if it is missing on the os.
On the net many have troubles with it on windows.
For some with the same problem, this might be some help....

After adding fontra https://pypi.org/project/fontra/
all I had to do was change in
font_helpers.py function get_fonts with imports import fontra and from pathlib import Path to

def get_fonts(folder: str | None = None) -> dict[str, dict[str, str]]:
    if folder:
        fontra.FONTDIRS_CUSTOM.append(Path(str))
        fontra.update_custom_fontfiles_index()
        fontra.update_fontrefs_index()
    else:
        fontra.init_fontdb()
    fonts: dict[str, dict[str, str]] = defaultdict(dict)
    families = fontra.all_fonts()
    for family in families:
        styles = fontra.get_font_styles(family)
        for style in styles:
            fonts[family][style] = fontra.get_font(family, style).path.absolute().as_posix()
    return dict(fonts)

It should do its job on macos and linux, but didn't test it.

[FriedrichFroebel]

I have never heard of fontra and it seems to be a rather new and unknown package. The first thing I stumbled upon is that it requires at least Python 3.9 - while Python 3.8 is EOL soon, this would be a breaking change.

For Windows, Anaconda might be an option, which has pre-built binaries for Windows as well: https://anaconda.org/anaconda/fontconfig (You might be able to use the binaries for a manual installation as well, but according to the info/index.json file, it seems like you will need some further dependencies which involves further work.)

[chrismaster]

I tried fontconfig from anaconda, from mingw, and some more, but didn't manage to make it work. So I gave fontra a try. Since it worked, I thought it might help someone with troubles on windows too. On linux and in container, everything is fine with fontconfig. Since I have a container running brother_ql_web, I am fine with dep on fontconfig.

ATM I am learning how this python universe works, my programming skills are 0, so fontra was a nice success. Setuptools, poetry, bottle, jinga so many things I never used, never heard of and hope someday I have a PR with tests for #19 . :-)
Thx for the help.

[FriedrichFroebel]

In the meantime, I am evaluating whether I can provide fontra as a drop-in replacement for fontconfig. For now, the results generated by fontra miss some entries to pass the existing integration tests, but maybe upstream has an idea about this: NCBM/fontra#3

[FriedrichFroebel]

The master branch now provides an optional fallback to fontra.