There is a limited choice of Monospace Font choices in Drafts for Mac:
(For instance, I have installed Monaspace and iA Writer font but they don’t appear here although I wonder why IBM Plex Mono is there)
iOS has more choices. Is that a limitation of the Mac?
Set up a smart group in Font Book for monospaced fonts.
Review what is installed and downloaded.
For me that matches what I see in Drafts.
I checked the Font Book and I already have a Smart Folder called Fixed Width too, although I don’t remember when I have created it. But, Drafts’ Monospace did not seem to point/pull from the Smart Folder. Do you have to do anything to point Drafts to the Smart Folder?
Drafts does not show iA Writer and Monaspace. But, I see IBM Plex Mono in the Font Book Smart Folder.
When I clicked on the download button in the Font Book to install the “grayed out” Spot Mono (as per my screenshot above), macOS downloaded the file and then this font showed in Drafts.
But not, iA Writer and Monaspace, which seemed to be the outlier… I am not sure why though. Maybe these were fonts I downloaded as a standalone and then copied or installed to Font Book; for example, Monaspace was downloaded as a cask using brew. I am quite sure I downloaded iA Writer from iA website. Perhaps, these are not counted {shrug}
The list is built based on macOS system APIs that identify monospaced fonts, and it should match the entries in Font Book, per the way @sylumer described. Did you check that the configuration of your “Fixed Width” collection matches “Design style == Monospaced”?
I also have the iA and some of the Monaspace variants installed and they do not appear in that collection for me because the font files they distribute are not properly configured. I don’t know much about the internals of font files, but there is some metadata monospace fonts are supposed to specify and those do not do it properly.
If you are making changes, installs, uninstalls, you might need to relaunch Drafts to pick them up, because I believe I’m caching that list because it’s slow to build – but otherwise it should match the list of properly configured fonts.
Yep… iA Writer and Monaspace are listed in this Smart Folder that has ‘Design = Monospaced’. But not appearing in Drafts, even after I restarted Drafts.
I have another Mac, running on macOS Sonoma and have no Monaspace font installed. I did a brew install of Monaspace, checked that it appear in Font Book, Fixed Width, ‘Design style == Monospaced’ and rebooted the machine. Nope, same thing in Drafts, no Monaspace shown.
It’s ok, I will move on and use other monospace font - just FYI, this came about because I see that the to-do bracket [ ] in macOS is tighter (very narrow, hard to tick to mark complete) as compared to the to-do bracket in iOS, even though I am using the same Syntax for both. After poking around, I notice that it is due to the different Monospace Font in mac Drafts and iOS Drafts. I chose one font that both OS have, e.g. Menlo, and I get a consistent spacing in the bracket. I am happy.
It looks like Apple might be using the Panose proportion categories, OS/2 Font styles and types to determine a Design style. I think the “monospaced” classification comes down to the proportion being set as “Monospaced”.
Taking Courier New as a common example and using Font Forge to examine the font file:
Whereas iAWriter’s Mono (static & regular) font does not have that meta data specified.
I couldn’t find any technical details from Apple on this so the above is a bit of a piecing things together from reading as much info as I could find about the sorts of ways fonts get categorised and what meta data they have.
I did try using Font Forge to amend the file properties, but it threw up lots of issues when trying to regenerate the TTF file. It may be Font Forge isn’t up to the job, I got the save settings wrong, I was wrong about the particular source for the Monospaced classification, or I’m, just entirely wrong about the whole thing; but for whatever reason, even after amendment and reinstalling Font Book didn’t recognise it as monospaced, and of course, neither did Drafts.
