buena-mono

Buena Mono is a free, writer-first monospace typeface designed for extended prose in markdown and code editors while keeping code legible. It is a two-axis variable font: weight 100–800 and slant 0 to −10°, built from 8 masters, with 16 named instances (Thin through ExtraBold, each upright and italic). The project reports 5,406 glyphs, 4,285 codepoints, 971 languages and 51 OpenType features. Language support is verified with shaperglot rather than counted from codepoints. The character set covers Latin (including Extended A–D), Greek, Cyrillic, IPA, math operators, arrows, box drawing, block and shade elements, Braille, Legacy Computing block graphics, Powerline, game and music symbols, and currency. Design metrics include 1000 units per em, an advance width of 618 for all glyphs, cap height 699, x-height 524, and ascender/descender of 950/−250. The high x-height-to-cap ratio is intended to keep lowercase text substantial at small editor sizes. Italics are obliques — a 10° shear of the upright masters with each glyph re-centred — rather than redrawn cursive forms. Every advance width is an exact multiple of 618, including multi-cell ligatures, so sequences stay in column alignment. OpenType features include code ligatures (liga, calt) that occupy whole cells, small caps (smcp, c2sc), figures (lnum, tnum, onum, numr, dnom, sups, sinf, frac), anchor-driven marks (ccmp, mark, mkmk), 13 stylistic sets (ss01–ss13) and 13 character variants (cv01–cv13). Stylistic sets offer alternates such as single-story a, descending f, tailed l, serifed i and j, alternate g forms, straight- and curved-tail y, plain and dotted zero, alternate r, and a machine-readable mode (ss13) that decomposes ligatures and resolves the zero to a slashed form for OCR or vision-model reading. Installation is via a release zip containing variable TrueType, variable CFF2, WOFF2 and the Google Fonts Roman/Italic pair. The README gives platform instructions for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a CSS @font-face example for self-hosting the variable webfont and using the slant axis. It also lists editor configuration for VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Sublime Text, Neovim/Vim and terminals such as iTerm2 and Kitty. Building from source requires Python 3.9+ and provides make targets for build, QA, fontspector testing, HTML proofs and packaging the Google Fonts submission. The design source is a Glyphs 3 file with generated UFO masters and a designspace; mark and mkmk features are generated from anchors at build time. Buena Mono is explicitly a derivative work, not an original design. Its core Latin outlines come from Fragment Mono by Wei Huang, itself derived from Nimbus Sans (URW Design Studio), and were substantially transformed: respaced to a 618-unit cell, cap height set to 699, a weight axis derived across 8 masters, a slant axis added, and the character set extended. Additional glyphs and reference outlines come from IBM Plex Mono, Noto (Latin/Greek/Cyrillic), Cascadia Code, JetBrains Mono and Bravura; chess pieces are original art. Upstream reserved font names are respected, and the full copyright chain is recorded in FONTLOG.txt. The font is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.