Italic weight is not as wide as Normal weight.

[ascheel]

The same text in italic is shorter than with normal font weight. The below line is my example text. If that line is present two times, one in italic, the other without, the italic line is shorter by about 5 character-widths as visible here: https://imgur.com/a/OF2PJjV

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890

As many people use monospaced fonts in programming roles, this means that two lines, one commented and the other not, do not line up and are arguably no longer monospaced since there are multiple space widths depending on italics, bold, etc.

[davelab6]

I'm reviewing old internal bug reports and a user wrote:

Roboto Mono:

Same text in Noto Mono, which does not have the issue: http://screen/k8vxv44kVhM

Since 80-character line length limits are common in code style guides (except Go) means to me that Roboto Mono font, despite being an awesome font otherwise, is not usable.

My reason for using Roboto Mono is that I like its aesthetics & legibility more than that of other popular coding fonts I tried, but that is about it.

If this can't be fixed or takes too enormous of an effort to fix, I'll probably find myself another coding font to love => fine to resolve as wontfix.

Though I'm curious what purposes other than coding and things related to coding a monospace font serves.

I explained the 'other purposes' was use by Visual Design teams to make documents that felt technical.

My guess is that to prevent disruption with existing users, a vf MONO axis could be added to make it possible to switch between the current and desired italic metrics.