Cascadia SemiLight variant isn't a true fixed width font

ZStoner commented 1 year ago

Cascadia family version

2111.001

Cascadia family variant(s)

Cascadia Mono (the version without ligatures)

Font file format(s)

Windows Terminal included version (TTF (variable))

Platform

Windows

Other Software

Visual Studio Code

What happened?

I seem to notice that only the Cascadia SemiLight variants (Code or Mono) may render extended characters in variable width. A good character to practice with is the checkmark character [✓] (Char Hex: 0x2713).

Traditionally, I've been a Consolas font user. But I noticed that when viewing the VSCode settings.json file, some of the characters didn't vertically line up properly.

Then I switched to use Cascadia Mono. I generally didn't like it because the default stroke width is slightly thicker than any other Fixed-Width font I've used. ☹️

After this, I switched to use Cascadia Mono SemiLight. This had a much more reasonable font thickness for its default stroke width. However, the SemiLight variant appears to have the same variable-width problems with certain characters... even worse than in Consolas (which is subtle in comparison).

ONLY the SemiLight variants have this problem (regardless if it's Code or Mono). All of the other published variants display proper fixed width characters.

Note: I have not reviewed the Cascadia PowerLine (PL) versions.

All of the examples below are using the following Markdown table text for the telemetry.telemetryLevel setting in the master settings.json file. For me, this text was located on lines 16-23 in settings.json. And all snips are using editor.fontSize: 12 and no font weight (editor.fontWeight: "")

Raw Text and Screen snips from VS Code under different font variants... Color Theme used: One Dark Pro Darker.

Raw Text : (...visually in the browser, this may also appear very misaligned) 👎🏼😦

// The following table outlines the data sent with each setting:
// 
// |       | Crash Reports | Error Telemetry | Usage Data |
// |:------|:---------------------:|:---------------:|:--------------:|
// | all   |            ✓          |        ✓        |        ✓       |
// | error |            ✓          |        ✓        |        -       |
// | crash |            ✓          |        -        |        -       |
// | off   |            -          |        -        |        -       |

Consolas, 12pt : (...subtlety misaligned widths) 😐
Lucida Console, 12pt : (...Consistent char widths) 😃👍🏼
Cascadia Mono Regular, 12pt : (...Pixel-perfect char widths) 😃👍🏼
Cascadia Mono Light, 12pt : (...Pixel-perfect char widths) 😃👍🏼
Cascadia Mono SemiLight, 12pt : (...Notably misaligned widths) 👎🏼😦
These other Cascadia variants also produced Consistent widths: ExtraLight, SemiBold. 😃👍🏼