Hinted mono fonts and Liberation Mono on old OSes

[KHMan]

Hi all,

This is a writeup of my experiences with recent Liberation Mono
font issues for us stubborn holdouts :-) who aren't using
ClearType on an old OS (WinXP) and needs a fully hinted mono font.
Of course, for those who want something more modern than Courier
New, there is always Lucida Console, but I like dotted zeros too...

Liberation fonts have switched and recent releases are no longer
fully hinted. As such, the last release that worked well on WinXP
is liberation-fonts-ttf-1.07.2.tar.gz. Unfortunately, lately
LibreOffice on Win32 has been installing the Liberation fonts
automatically. So this breaks my requirement of a hinted font for
source code editing.

Just about the only other free hinted mono TTF font seems to be
Ubuntu Mono. It looks a lot more modern, but I lean more towards
Liberation Mono. Also, hinting is no longer a priority nowadays --
Adobe's Source Sans Pro blog indicated they have no plans for
hinting for that font. There are other alternatives of course,
some bitmap fonts too, but a solution that allows me to still use
the old Liberation Mono would be ideal.

In the end, in order to avoid regular breakage, I generated a set
of renamed Liberation Mono fonts using FontForge. Though the MinGW
version of FontForge crashes a lot at certain points, the TTF
files work. So this is an option for those of us who have a
similar font collision issue.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

[Neil Hodgson]

KHMan:

> Just about the only other free hinted mono TTF font seems to be Ubuntu Mono.

Cousine appears to be hinted and derived from Liberation Mono
http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Cousine
http://code.google.com/p/noto/wiki/Cousine

Neil

[KHMan]

Many thanks, Cousine works exactly like the old hinted Liberation
Mono on WinXP. I had an old version (most font sites seem to be
peddling an old version) and failed to download the latest from
Google Web Fonts...

So I do have a number of choices now :-), the following are either
hinted or bitmapped and are of the same size:
font:Cousine,size:10
font:Inconsolata,size:12
font:Dina,size:10
A bit taller,
font:Ubuntu Mono,size:12