Noto Sans Mono: Are italics on the roadmap?

[phyllisstein]

👋 Hello! I've been playing around with Noto Sans Mono (v2.000;GOOG;noto-source:20170915:90ef993387c0, in case that's relevant) as my text-editor and terminal-emulator font of choice lately, and I'm really enjoying it---it's a handsome and readable little guy, elegant and solid without being quite as flashy as something like e.g. Source Code Pro. Plus I used to love Droid Sans Mono and you can really feel Droid in its bones.

My one gripe so far is that it lacks an italic variant. In addition to leaning on italics when I do writing writing in Markdown or LaTeX, I tend to sprinkle them throughout my code themes as well, for things like function parameters and comments and keywords. (It's mostly an aesthetic preference for sure, but in my defense what isn't.)

macOS does a fair-to-middling job of interpolating an oblique style, but it's transparently and distractingly not a "true" italic, especially at larger sizes:

...and especially by comparison with Source Code Pro:

So though I know it's a wide typographical world and you folks have a lot on your collective plate, I was idly curious whether there were any plans to add a legit italic to Noto Sans Mono's stack. A good mono is hard to come by these days, and I'd be excited to see NSM come fully into its own as one of them.

[davelab6]

Are italics on the roadmap?

They are now 🤣

More seriously, thanks for suggesting this, we will consider it :)

[phyllisstein]

Hah!

That's fabulous, thanks for being open to the possibility. I look forward to seeing what comes of it. 😬

[barmadrid]

@davelab6 Any progress on Noto Sans Mono Italics version yet?

[caoman]

Hi, we are also interesting in getting the Mono Italics version. Is there any update on this?

[simoncozens]

The current status of this is that it would be very nice to have, we're aware that it's a need, and we'd like to see it happen, but right now there's no budget for a completely new italic. (It's quite a big undertaking; for parity with the existing Noto Sans Mono, we'd need 31464 glyphs to be drawn.) We'll keep this open and keep pushing for budget for family expansions like this.