Comment 0 for bug 727733

Originally, when the initial monospace design was created to match the height of the standard Ubuntu fonts, the design box was +962/-198; +962 is the posiiton of the very top node on the double accents above ǞǠȪȬȰ. These were the UbuntuBeta Mono test versions up to R21 (100% scale of regular Ubuntu fonts) and were 1120×560 high being rendered into a cell of 1000×560.

When used in a terminal positing the glyphs on this causes overlaps and a very close line-spacing; this is good for lines of code, but worse for reading symbols and punctuation.

In order to prevent any overlaps, we then decided to scale down this to bring the design box into 1000 high so keeping the same design box ratio, that brings 1000/(962+198)=0.86207 (86)% scaling. There are the fonts UbuntuBeta Mono R21 fonts.

However this R21 attempt did not give a very concise sizing horizontally so we have gone back to the original 100% version, scaled to 89.3% (500/560 glyph widths) to give us the 12pitch at 12pt, 2:1 matrix. Scaling slightly larger than the earlier 86% version meant that we had to tweak a few of the larger glyphs (like ǞǠȪȬȰ) to bring then into a 1000 unit design box, so we now have a design box of of 1000×500 (ascender/descender of 830/-170).