A Revelating Change to Our Font Usage

10/19/2021

For just over two years, Liberation Mono has been our official monospace typeface. However, we ourselves hardly complied.

There had been a long-running discrepancy in our monospace font selection across our infrastructure. As a result, most applications used Liberation Mono, while a few--like our text editor and terminal emulator--used the environment default, which turned out to be Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Since said two applications had been used in most of our activities, we barely used Liberation Mono throughout this past couple of years.

Said discrepancy had been brought back and forth in our agenda for well over a year. As our desktop environment had gone major changes over the past few weeks (see our new Netronic desktop theme suite!), we figured that this is a good time to patch it up.

After some long-overdue, subjective comparisons, we decided to abandon Liberation Mono in favor of the environment default--understandably, the former is designed to be metric-compatible with Courier New. However, the Bitstream Vera project and its DejaVu derivative seem to be unmaintained for a while. The Internet suggested that we turn to Hack. Having built on both foundations, we have been very happy with it as a drop-in replacement.

Therefore, Hack has replaced Liberation Mono as our official monospace typeface. This has been patched throughout our infrastructure and web projects, including EDEN Online. Hack is described as a typeface designed for source code, and is brought to the world by Source Foundry.