If it's not released, we can't use it.

I'm sure you've personally told me that when I've needed Kubuntu to do something in the past.

Release management of Noto is curious, depending on where you get your release from it is released.

I've filed an issue to ask why it's not in the download tar https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/711

Our current default is Oxygen Mono which is unmaintained and no longer released so it's no worse.

Maintainers answered on https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/711 and they seem to recommend git versions over tar versions

even if not optimal i think we should go for it

ok, but it'd have to be 5.8 given we're past dependency freeze.

In D1816#34042, @davidedmundson wrote:

ok, but it'd have to be 5.8 given we're past dependency freeze.

yeah, makes sense, let's go for 5.8

It's important to chime in here.

There is a huge issue with fonts in general, that do not provide all font faces. What we need is: regular (sometimes called roman?), bold, italic (sometimes called oblique), and bold italic (4 flavours in total).

As background: Oxygen Mono does only contain the font face "Regular". As a result, Kate, Kile, KDevelop (and every other app that uses the fixed font) cannot display anything in bold and/or italic. This already happened with the Oxygen font. As a consequence, Kile is pretty much hard to use, since the visual structure is hard to grasp, or C++ keywords like 'return' or 'void' are not thick in KDevelop/Kate.

That said, looking into Noto Mono, this font has the exactly same problem.

In other words: Noto Mono is a big no-no, just like Oxygen was (we unfortunately only noticed this issues very late).

The issue is even worse: Since users already use Plasma, they have "Oxygen" in kateglobalsrc. The above patch fixes this. But the "Oxygen" font also is in kateschemarc, for instance. This also needs to be fixed (and probably additionally blacklisted in the ktexteditor framework).

So from my side, this patch has the same problems as Oxygen Mono already had...

If you have further discussions about fonts, please consider also CCing kwrite-devel.

From a design perspective this is a no-brainer. Using another font is meaningless. So we in the VDG obviously approve of a switch to Noto Mono.

(that said I cant comment on the technical issues only the design ones)

Maybe I should have added: Since you already contacted the Noto devs on the googlegroup, can you also ask whether a bold-face variant and italic variant exists?

Mono in phase 3 is planned to have multiple weights, and will likely add a
condensed version. No italic is scheduled. We don't yet have alpha drops of the
new Mono.

BTW, the character repertoire for Mono is not the same as LGC, though there is
significant overlap. You can see the currently planned repertoire by examining
the data in the nototools/nototools/noto_cmap_phase3.xml file. We hope to
extend this to include some Math characters after work on that starts but this
is still tentative, see issue #669.

https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/716

Hm, that doesn't sound as if the problem will solved within the next weeks.

I personally am using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono [1] in Kate. I don't know about its completeness, though. It is often said that the DejaVu fonts [2] extend the Bitstream Vera fonts and are more complete, but also look a bit different. Thing is, would that be an alternative?

If not, there is always the possibility of hard-coding it in Kate, since as said, a font without bold and italic font faces is a no-go for us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

Or what about the Source Code Pro font?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Pro

Source Code Pro doesn't seem to be easily downloadable or packaged by any distro so I don't see that as something distros will accept easily. But feel free to add it into Kate.

Maybe I dismissed Source Code Pro too quickly, I've asked distros for an opinion on it

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-distro-packagers/2016-July/000201.html

http://i.imgur.com/rhZhlzY.png
Oxygen Mono has no bold/italic so nothing removed from status quo by using Noto Mono

http://i.imgur.com/Cv6bgUy.png Source Code Pro

Hack and Source Code Pro are beautiful fonts for programming - from a Debian perspective, there is no reason to not use Hack, we have it in the archive already (I don't know about Source Code Pro though).

@dhaumann Does this font satisfy your concerns?

Yes, the font faces are all there, so HACK does qualify.

On a personal note, I think the 'i' looks a bit strange, but that's probably to distinguish it form better form a 'j'. Here, to my eyes, the 'i' from the Source Code Pro font looks better, but given I did not further study on whether both fonts are free, or which font provides more glyphs.

So yes, we can just try HACK, and if people complain, still change.

One more comment, can we add the kateschemarc file to the update script?

We need to change this line:
Font=Oxygen Mono,9,-1,7,50,0,0,0,0,0
i.e. searching for "Font=Oxygen Mono," and replacing it with "Font=Hack," should do the trick.

There may be multiple occurances of "Font=", and all should be replaced.

Can we extend this?

Is this still an open issue or can this be closed?