Re: [Fontforge-users] Regenerated font does not recognize as a Monospace in Windows

[Paul F. W. <pa...@fr...>]

ms...@an... wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Oct 2012, Paul Flo Williams wrote:
>> the same advance width. (It matters not that it takes a peculiar,
>> non-standard reading of the simple word "or" to come to this conclusion;
>> that is ancient history.)
>
> If we are going to set the flag if and only if all glyphs are strictly the
> same width, not allowing some to be zero, for compatibility with other
> software that requires that to be the meaning of the flag, fine.  That may
> be the right thing to do.  But I think we should never say that such a
> meaning for the flag is required by the specification; instead, it is a
> deliberate choice to break the specification for compatibility with other,
> broken, software.  To claim that this semantic for the flag is a
> requirement of a specification that actually says something quite
> different, creates needless confusion when we talk to people who do know
> what the word "or" means in English and who don't know the ancient
> history of the question.  If we choose not to follow the spec, let's
> admit it - and mention it in the documentation.

I agree with your natural reading of the specification, but this exact
same point came up back in March this year when Steve White suggested
changing FontForge's behaviour to match it. Khaled said that the
particular reading of the specification that FontForge follows had been
decided in discussions on the OpenType mailing list a long time ago.
Unfortunately, there appears to be no public archive of that list.

DejaVu's wiki mentions how they deal with combining diacritical marks in
Mono:

http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Typography#Combining_Diacritical_Marks

I take this to be a good model of how to set isFixedPitch to 1 and have
every glyph the same width.

-- 
Paul Flo Williams
http://hisdeedsaredust.com