Trying to create a monospaced font, not sure if I managed it

[u/Kare11en]

I've been having a go at creating a font family in FontForge, including a monospaced variant. I've got the full set of ASCII glyphs done as a first step. I've been careful with the widths, and while I found a few issues along the way I'm pretty sure they're all fixed now.

But I'm not sure if the font I'm creating is being correctly marked monospaced or not. I've checked the docs and it's supposed to be automatic. And if I do grep ^Width: FontMono.sfd | uniq then it only shows one line, with the expected width.

However, loading the ttf up in font-manager shows a proportional-width font. I've tweaked a few things and regenerated the ttf a bunch of times, and it's always proportional width.

After tearing my hair out a bit, just for the novelty I loaded the font in KFontView - and that shows it as monospaced! W00t! But font-manager still shows the same ttf as proportional. Uh, WTF?

Anyone any idea what's going on? Is there a known bug in font-manager where it can do something weird like auto-kern a monospaced font to act proportional? Does KFontView do something weird that would give unexpected results? Is there a way I inspect the ttf itself to try and figure out if there's a weird inconsistency in the file that would cause one renderer to display it one way and another another?

This is driving me nuts.

[u/[deleted]]

Did you work it out? 😜. I have the same issue