You must have missed my PR #72368. It's basically the same thing with additional generation of .psf fonts and a patch to make the package deterministic.

Indeed, I missed your PR. I will close this one.

Quick question though: with pango 1.44 dropping support for type 1 bitmap fonts, shouldn't bitmaps fonts be packaged with an otb version by default?

Some fonts like cherry do it already but I completely forgot about it when opening this PR since 19.09 still uses Pango 1.43.

I didn't know about that, but I don't have any software on my computer using pango.
You should open an issue for this, it seems pretty important.

There is a tool here that does the conversion: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion

Yes, there is also the fonttosnft tool that the cherry font in nixpkgs uses. It's a simple matter of conversion but the results are not always.. accurate. Some fonts are cropped weirdly and the xft naming scheme is not as accurate as the xlfd one.
I will open a separate issue.

#72368