Meslo LG is a customized version of Apple's Menlo-Regular font (which is a customized Bitstream Vera Sans Mono).
In Snow Leopard, Menlo-Regular is now the preferred and default font for Apple's developer tools and also the Terminal (unless you changed the font settings for these apps yourself before upgrading to SL - your changes will stay in place).
I really like Menlo but I do have my nitpicky gripes with it:
That's why I decided to customize Menlo, regarding these issues. The tricky part is keeping all the custom tables, hints, etc. intact when you adjust the globally very affecting stuff that results in vertical spacing.
The LG in Meslo LG stands for Line Gap. The idea behind it is to allow the user to have some control over vertical spacing by choosing one of three line gap variants: small, medium and large (Meslo LG S, Meslo LG M and Meslo LG L respectively).
You can find a comparison for Mac OS X in the Wiki and some example screenshots for Windows.
For a possible way to install this font on your Windows console please see Using Meslo LG with the Windows Console.
You can find a FAQ here.
For more articles please refer to the Meslo-Font Wiki. Last, but not least, for additional info and comparisons please consult the About PDF that comes with the downloadable ZIP archive.
Have Fun!
André Berg
v0.1
Initial release.
v1.0
Meslo has changed it's name to Meslo LG which now includes three variants: small, medium and large.
LG stands for Line Gap, so there's one variant for smaller vertical line spacing, more towards Apple's Menlo, a normal line gap (which equals Meslo v0.1) and a large gap, which is more than twice the space of Apple's Menlo.
In addition to Regular, there's Italic, Bold and Bold Italic font styles included for each LG variant.
Tweaked the ascender/descender/line gap relationship a bit for better layout at marginal smaller font sizes and prominent font styles (such as Bold and Bold Italic). Things line underlines should be better to perceive now for the font styles.
The asterisk (*) was tweaked for all font styles. This includes making it line up with all alignment zones for similar height symbol characters and fixing Menlo's absence of a slanting angle for the italic and bold italic font styles while maintaining the readability at all sizes.
v1.0
Added a dotted zero version of Meslo LG which is called Meslo LG DZ.
v1.2
reworked all OS/2 metrics to perform uniformly across platforms...
...which should fix issues with monospace layout and line height on Windows. (tests in Notepad, Eclipse and Visual Studio 2012 Express on Windows 7 x64 SP1 look promising).
v1.2.1
Note: if you are on OS X and are currently happy with Meslo v1.0 there is no need to upgrade to v1.2 since this version is just fixes for Windows mostly. Also, sorry, no Arabic support yet since I haven't found a Bitstream like font that allows extracting portions of arabic code pages to be used in another font.
v1.2.2
v1.2.3
v1.2.4
v1.2.5 * Revert OS/2 version back to 3 * Add license and copyright notice to release archives
Menlo is a Trademark of Apple Inc.
Bitstream Vera is a trademark of Bitstream, Inc., designed by Jim Lyles.
Meslo
Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2013 André Berg.
Menlo
Copyright © 2009 Apple Inc.
Copyright © 2006 by Tavmjong Bah.
Copyright © 2003 by Bitstream, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
All other brands and product names not specifically listed are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Thank you to Jim Lyles and Bitstream for the Bitstream Vera family of fonts. Also, huge thanks to George Williams for the free font editing program FontForge.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
