Cannot select Fira Mono as monospaced font under KDE

[houserockr]

I am running KDE on OpenSuSE 13.1.
Within almost any font chooser dialog, I cannot select Fira Mono (TTF Version 3.111) as a monospaced font, although the font is installed and selectable in LibreOffice, for instance.

I've played around with fontforge a bit. It doesn't complain about having different advances or something. It does however complain about erroneous minima/maxima.

Is there any workaround that enables me to select that font?

[patrykdesign]

We'll try to address this in the next update, likely Q1 2015.

[schriftgestalt]

@houserockr could you send me a monospace font that works for you. I don't have KDE to test so I would at least need a font to compare it to.

[carrois]

Hi Houserockr.

Please try these files.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/si29c78emoyr2f1/AAB4ZCjMop_5lOiYNyX6IC4Ua?dl=0

We eliminated the nonspacing accents from export.
They might have been the problem as Glyphs sets them to zero width when exporting.
Could you please report?

Please don’t use these file for other purposes by now as we work on an official update of Fira Mono in which we would like include your feedback.
This Test version is still buggy due to new anchor behaviour of Glyphs 2. Thanks!

[jfkthame]

Untested hypothesis: I suspect this may well be a symptom of the xAvgCharWidth error described in issue 47. Fixing that might allow KDE to recognize the font as being monospaced.

If that's the case, the test version above ought to work, as it has xAvgCharWidth=600.

[houserockr]

Hey there, thank you very much for addressing this issue!
Unfortunately, I'm on vacation right now, so I can't test it on KDE.
However, I tested it on OSX, where it works like a charm!
I can test KDE next week, if this fits with whatever deadlines you have!?

[carrois]

There’s no rush, Mono 4.0 won’t be released in the next weeks. Romans and Italics first.
Thanks for reporting after your vacaction.

[houserockr]

Tested it on Kubuntu 14.10 with the new KDE plasma 5.2 --> working!
I would still like to test it next week on the plattform I reported...

[houserockr]

Also works on KDE 4, OpenSuSE 13.1 (platform reported)!
Thank you!

[wolftune]

I'm confused about the status of this. I downloaded the latest Fira Mono 3.2 from this repo, and I'm not able to select Fira Mono in Yakuake. Is the fix not actually released yet?

[patrykdesign]

Fira Mono 3.2 should have the fix. @houserockr can you help @wolftune in anyway? Not sure what you did to get it working?

[houserockr]

I have to say that I haven't tested version 3.2. I only tested the "-KDE" version above, which I am still using since my test.

Here's what I did to install the font:
$ cp font.ttf ~/.fonts/
$ fc-cache -r

[jfkthame]

It looks like there are a couple of glyphs in the Fira Mono 3.2 fonts that still don't have the correct advance width; check "fraction" (U+2044) and "uni2215" (division slash). This is probably what prevents some applications accepting the fonts as "monospaced".

While here, I also noticed that there are discrepancies between the .ttf and .otf versions of the fonts: they don't contain identical OpenType layout tables, as I would have expected. It looks like they were generated from slightly different versions of the source, which is rather unfortunate as it will lead to unexpected and confusing differences in behavior.