amber-fonts

Adobe's Source family — the typefaces the Amber Linux suite draws with, packaged once. Three are Adobe's own releases; two are Adobe's code face with the Nerd Fonts glyphs patched in.

There is no code here. This repository exists because copal, kat800 and amberlin each carried their own copy of the same font, and two packages owning the same file cannot be installed together.

Why the suite ships a font at all

No Debian package carries the Nerd Fonts patch. Without this one, a fresh install renders in whatever Pango picks instead of the face the applications were designed for — a fallback that is invisible in the code and obvious on screen.

It is also load-bearing for how the suite looks. An answer in Amberlin and the same note on Copal's board are one object: they share a silhouette derived from the note's Ambrosia id, and they have to share a letterform too, or the text undoes what the shape achieves.

Five families, not interchangeable

Family	Spacing	Icons	Used by
SauceCodePro Nerd Font	monospaced	natural width	kat800 — its editor font and its terminal profiles
SauceCodePro Nerd Font Mono	monospaced	one character cell	kat800 — its default terminal face: VTE is a character grid
Source Code Pro	monospaced	none	copal, amberlin, pinax — code and monospaced text that draws no icons
Source Sans 3	proportional	none	proportional prose; the candidate for Amberlin's note bodies
Source Serif 4	proportional	none	proportional prose, where a serif reads better than a sans

The Nerd Font glyphs exist only in the two SauceCodePro families. Source Code Pro, Source Sans 3 and Source Serif 4 are Adobe's plain releases: asking any of them for a powerline arrow or a folder icon gets the fallback box. Only a terminal draws those glyphs, and only kat800 is a terminal.

Source Code Pro and SauceCodePro are the same outlines, the second being the first with the icons patched in under a different name. The icons cost an order of magnitude on disk — 210 kB a face against 2.4 MB — so Source Code Pro is the family to ask for when the text is code and nothing else, and a SauceCodePro family when something has to draw an icon at a text position.

The three code families are monospaced — fontconfig reports spacing=100 for each. Source Sans 3 and Source Serif 4 are proportional, which is why they are here: a note body set in a monospaced face runs wide, and the measure that suits a path suits a paragraph badly. Which face Amberlin sets note bodies in is an open question, argued in amberlin/docs/SPEC.md § Open questions; settling it means seeing the proportional face and the code face side by side in a real note, which needs both installed.

Asking for the wrong family gets a silent fallback rather than an error. Four styles each — Regular, Bold, Italic, BoldItalic — so emphasis has somewhere to go. Upstream ships every weight from ExtraLight to Black, and Source Serif 4 a set of optical sizes on top; the package carries the four styles and nothing else, so what a caller may ask for is one sentence rather than a file list.

Each directory installs under /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ — saucecodepro-nerd/ for both SauceCodePro families, source-code-pro/, source-sans-3/, source-serif-4/ — and they coexist: distinct families, distinct filenames, nothing overwrites anything.

Build

make check    # every promised face is present and is really a font
make lint     # each face reports the family name consumers ask for
make deb      # binary .deb into dist/
make ci       # check + build + lint + deb
make deb-install
make deb-remove
make clean

make lint asks fc-query what family each file actually declares rather than trusting its filename. A rename upstream would otherwise break Copal and Amberlin silently, which is the exact failure this package exists to prevent.

Packaging notes

Two things here were learned the expensive way in copal and are kept deliberately:

• Faces are installed one at a time, never cp -r packaging/fonts. A recursive copy also carries each family's OFL.txt into /usr/share/fonts, where a licence file is not a font, and gives every directory the builder's umask.
• No fc-cache, and no maintainer scripts at all. fontconfig ships a dpkg trigger on /usr/share/fonts that rebuilds the cache for every package that writes there. Calling it by hand is redundant and trips maintainer-script-updates-fontconfig-cache-improperly.

Architecture: all — a font is the same bytes on every machine.

Licence

The fonts are Adobe's, all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Each family ships its own copy of that licence, because the copyright notice and the Reserved Font Names are stated in the file and differ per family.

Directory	Fonts	Licence copy
saucecodepro-nerd/	Source Code Pro (Copyright 2010–2020 Adobe) patched by Nerd Fonts	packaging/fonts/OFL.txt
source-code-pro/	Source Code Pro (Copyright 2023 Adobe)	packaging/fonts/truetype/source-code-pro/OFL.txt
source-sans-3/	Source Sans 3 (Copyright 2010–2022 Adobe)	packaging/fonts/truetype/source-sans-3/OFL.txt
source-serif-4/	Source Serif 4 (Copyright 2014–2023 Adobe)	packaging/fonts/truetype/source-serif-4/OFL.txt

Source is a Reserved Font Name. Clause 3 of the OFL forbids a modified version from using it, which is why the patched faces are SauceCodePro rather than Source Code Pro. The installed package puts all four copies in /usr/share/doc/amber-fonts/.

Which upstream release each face comes from, and the sha256 of the archive it was taken from, is recorded in packaging/fonts/SOURCES. No face here is rebuilt, subsetted or renamed: each one is a byte-for-byte member of the archive named there.

The packaging in this repository — the Makefile and the packaging/ templates — is BSD-3-Clause, so nothing here is more restrictive than the fonts it wraps. It covers the packaging only; nothing narrows the OFL. See LICENSE.