buena mono

Writer-first monospace typeface — tuned for extended prose in markdown and code editors while keeping code perfectly legible. A two-axis variable font: weight 100–800 and slant 0 to −10°, from 8 masters.

5,406 glyphs · 4,285 codepoints · 971 languages · 51 OpenType features

⬇ Download the latest release · Try it in the browser →

buena mono is 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 then substantially transformed — see Provenance. Released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Install

Download the latest release — a single zip with every format plus the licence. Unzip it and you'll find the fonts in fonts/:

| File | Use | |---|---| | BuenaMono-VF.ttf | variable TrueType — install this one on your machine | | BuenaMono-VF.otf | variable CFF2 | | BuenaMono-VF.woff2 | webfont | | BuenaMono[wght].ttf · BuenaMono-Italic[wght].ttf | the Google Fonts pair (see below) |

Then:

• macOS — open BuenaMono-VF.ttf and click Install Font (or drop it into Font Book).
• Windows — right-click BuenaMono-VF.ttf → Install.
• Linux — copy to ~/.local/share/fonts/ and run fc-cache -f.

To browse the individual files instead of the zip, they're in fonts/variable/.

Web — self-host the variable webfont:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Buena Mono";
  src: url("BuenaMono-VF.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-weight: 100 800;
}
/* slant is a separate axis (0 to -10): */
.slanted { font-variation-settings: "slnt" -10; }

Two builds. BuenaMono-VF is the two-axis font above, and is the recommended download. The Google Fonts distribution instead ships a Roman + Italic pair — BuenaMono[wght].ttf and BuenaMono-Italic[wght].ttf — with slnt pinned to 0 and −10, because Google Fonts models italics as a separate family member rather than an axis. Both come from the same masters; the pair is generated by scripts/build-gf-pair.py.

Design

| | | |---|---| | Units per em | 1000 | | Advance width | 618 (all glyphs, including ligatures, which occupy whole multiples) | | Cap height | 699 | | x-height | 524 | | Ascender / descender | 950 / −250 | | Masters | 8 (4 weights × upright/slanted) | | Named instances | 16 — Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, each upright and italic |

The high x-height-to-cap ratio (524/699) is the main concession to prose: it keeps lowercase text substantial at the small sizes editors run at, without lengthening the ascenders enough to loosen line spacing.

The italics are obliques: a 10° shear of the upright masters, with each glyph re-centred in the cell. They are not redrawn cursive forms, and no letter takes a different skeleton when slanted. This is the usual approach for a monospace, where every form has to stay on the same fixed advance either way.

Every advance width is an exact multiple of 618 — 618 for ordinary glyphs, 1236 / 1854 / 2472 for multi-cell ligatures — so no sequence can fall out of column alignment.

Character set

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.

Language support is verified with shaperglot rather than counted from codepoints, so the 971 figure reflects languages that actually shape correctly.

Features

51 OpenType features (49 GSUB, 2 GPOS), including:

• Ligatures (liga, calt) — code ligatures that preserve column alignment: each occupies a whole number of cells (see Design), so != and => never pull a line out of grid.
• Small caps (smcp, c2sc) across the full cased range.
• Figures (lnum, tnum, onum, numr, dnom, sups, sinf, frac).
• Marks (ccmp, mark, mkmk) — anchor-driven, generated from the source.
• 13 stylistic sets (ss01–ss13) and 13 character variants (cv01–cv13).

Stylistic sets

| Tag | Alternate | | Tag | Alternate | |---|---|---|---|---| | ss01 | Single-story a | | ss08 | Straight-tail y | | ss02 | Descending f | | ss09 | Curved-tail y | | ss03 | Tailed l | | ss10 | Plain zero | | ss04 | Serifed i and j | | ss11 | Dotted zero | | ss05 | Alternate g | | ss12 | Alternate r | | ss06 | Alternate g (2) | | ss13 | Machine-readable mode | | ss07 | Serifed i | | | |

ss13 is intended for text that will be read back by OCR or a vision model: it decomposes ligatures and resolves the zero to its unambiguous slashed form, leaving the default 0 untouched.

Enable a set with font-feature-settings: "ss01" 1; in CSS, or through your editor's OpenType settings.

In Writing App Editor

In use

Enabling ligatures in your editor

buena mono's code ligatures use calt/liga, which are on by default in most engines. Where they aren't:

• VS Code — "editor.fontFamily": "Buena Mono", "editor.fontLigatures": true
• JetBrains IDEs — Settings → Editor → Font → Buena Mono, check Enable ligatures
• Sublime Text — set "font_face": "Buena Mono"; ligatures are on unless no_calt is listed in "font_options"
• Neovim/Vim — use a GUI (Neovide, MacVim) with guifont=Buena\ Mono
• Terminals — iTerm2: Use ligatures in the profile; Kitty: on by default

Build from source

Requires Python 3.9+.

make build      # build the variable fonts into out/fonts/
make qa         # validation suite (metrics, winding, monospace integrity)
make test       # fontspector QA against the Google Fonts profile
make proof      # HTML proofs with diffenator2
make package    # assemble the Google Fonts submission (Roman + Italic pair)

Design source: sources/BuenaMono.glyphs (Glyphs 3), with generated UFO masters and a .designspace. Mark and mkmk features are generated from the source's anchors at build time rather than hand-maintained.

See CONTRIBUTING.md, the CHANGELOG, and RELEASES.md.

Feedback

Spotted a glyph that looks wrong, a ligature misbehaving in your editor, or a language that doesn't shape correctly? Open an issue — there are short forms for each, and they ask for the details needed to reproduce it (codepoint, app and OS, sample text).

You don't need to build the font to report something. Design feedback from writers and designers is as useful as bug reports from developers.

Credits

Made by Buena.

Provenance

buena mono is a derivative work. Its core Latin outlines were imported from Fragment Mono (Wei Huang, OFL 1.1), which itself derives from Nimbus Sans (URW Design Studio). Those outlines were then substantially transformed for this project:

• Respaced to a 618-unit cell — Fragment uses a narrower cell matched to SF Mono for terminal compatibility.
• Cap height set to 699; Fragment reduces its cap height below standard for line-fitting, which costs markdown headings their prominence.
• A weight axis (wght 100–800) derived across 8 masters — Fragment ships a single weight.
• A slant axis (slnt 0 to −10°) added.
• Character set extended well beyond Fragment's Latin coverage, to 5,406 glyphs.

Additional glyphs and reference outlines are drawn from the OFL families below. Every one is retained in the copyright notice on line 1 of OFL.txt, as the license requires:

| Family | Contribution | |---|---| | Fragment Mono | core Latin outlines | | IBM Plex Mono | Cyrillic, Latin Extended A/B, Pinyin | | Noto (Latin/Greek/Cyrillic) | polytonic Greek, Cyrillic Extended, Latin Extended-B | | Cascadia Code · JetBrains Mono | Greek & Coptic | | Bravura | treble and bass clefs (U+1D11E, U+1D122) |

The chess pieces (U+2654–265F) are original art by the author and carry no third-party outlines.

The Reserved Font Names of the upstream projects are respected: this font is named buena mono and carries no upstream RFN. FONTLOG.txt records the derivation and the full copyright chain.

License

buena mono is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Copyright 2026 The buena mono Project Authors · buenalabs.io