The issue

I wanted to upload a 28Mb custom font file (15Mb when compressed) to a website with a 6Mb limit. The file contains 175 characters (includes the space character) and 172 kerning paths. It has 63 accented characters for use in languages other than English.

The different colours below indicate some of the options available when de-assembling.



A solution

Use this De-Assembler plug-in to create smaller files; compress the new smaller files, perhaps placing more than one of them in folders, and upload those.

You could also use the plug-in to create just a range of characters for compressing and uploading.

(Continued in post#2)

Download the plug-in, decompress if necessary, and install to your user plug-ins folder. Place a copy of the custom font file in a work folder (just in case of accidents), start up Gimp and call up the plug-in:

Filters>>Custom Fonts>>Utility Tools>>Custom Font File De-assembler v.0.01…

The dialog:



If you just want to see what will be created use the default ‘Save options’ option to create new images just in Gimp.

Use the ‘Save to original folder - do not show child images’ option to save the actual files back to the work folder (over-writing the original file in the process).

Select the character set options that you require and click on ‘OK’.



I chose to use all the options which created 18 smaller custom font files.
You can see from my screenshot that all of the files are smaller than the 6MB limit (pure luck) but I chose to add more than one file to some folders, to reduce the number of upload files, and then to compress those folders.



The screenshot shows the folders that I created with the folder names that made sense to me; I just wanted to differentiate between the English based characters and the accented characters for other languages.

The zipped files are ready for uploading to the website.

Link to the custom font post with these files

(Continued in post#3)

Re-Assembler

Once downloaded, de-compressed and saved to a folder the user can choose to re-assemble the custom font characters (using File>>Open as Layers...) or use the plug-in to automate the process.

The base set of characters, containing the upper-case letters and any kerning paths, usually appear as the first item in the list of custom font xcf files and retain the original custom font filename; high-lighted in the screenshot below.



For example the user can elect to have either upper case or full case.

More importantly, the user can decide which, if any, of the accented characters to include in the final custom font upload; Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish language options are available.

Open the base custom font file in Gimp and call up the plug-in:

Filters>>Custom Fonts>>Utility Tools>>Custom Font File Re-Assembler v 01…



Select the options for the character layers to add to the image and click ‘OK’.

Save this file as you wish.

Any files that you downloaded and no longer need can now be deleted from your machine.

Very nice work Skinnyhouse, I like the possibility to chose character sets

I'll keep it, but I will still use your previous script "Splitter/Stitcher" for GC as it can make equals size, and for example not all upper case did enter in a 6 mega size, often my upper case and lower case are splitted to fit 6MB
But outside of GC, yes it's very nice

Thank you for the kind words Patrice.

Yes it's a case of desperate custom font measures - and to be honest the best solution for cusfonters would be for Omega to either raise the filesize limit or to increase the number of attachments per post allowed (preferably both).

Using the plug-ins adds an extra layer of work on the part of both uploader and downloader but I was hoping that they would offer some help choices.
I personally would use splitter/stitcher more often than the assembler/de-assembler version - but I thought it might allow folk the option of downloading accented characters or not.

Now that I have used them both a number of times I can see one or two things that I need to tweak. Sadly there seems to be no GC solution for Beast Files other than providing a scaled version - which I agree goes against the grain.

In light of Tim's decision to let GimpLearn lapse there seems to be no-where else for custom fonters to go!