FAQ

We’re eager to improve the font and make it better for everyone. Use the following options:

• For bug reports and feature requests, use our feedback channel on GitHub 

• For anything private, send us email and we’ll get back to you

Mac OS: Use either the Font Book app or a terminal command like otfccdump MonoLisa-Regular.ttf | jq .head.fontRevision . The command depends on otfcc and jq.

Linux: The same terminal trick works under Linux as well.

As a general solution, you can use the FontDrop web service.

In technical terms, versions one and two have been built differently. The biggest underlying change is that now the typeface is authored using Glyphs 3 (2 earlier) and it’s variable by definition. In other words, the weight of typeface became freely adjustable starting from version two. Because of the shift, all the fixes and improvements will go only towards version two as it would not be feasible to maintain both versions in parallel.

There’s an upgrade path available for version one users. If you bought it later than 1st of May 2022, the upgrade is free for you, otherwise you’ll receive a 50% discount for the version two within the same tier. See the orders page for further details.

You can upgrade by visiting My Orders page. We will deduct the amount you have already paid for earlier tier products. The same applies also for student licenses.

If you are on version 1, you have to upgrade to version 2 of the same tier first before you are able to upgrade to a higher tier of version 2.

Please ask the Paddle support to do this for you as they manage the data related to the orders.

See the refund policy for the exact terms and conditions.

Starting from 2.0, we have yearly subscriptions available for businesses at different levels. A company could for example buy a yearly license for itself or a team. See the buy page for the specific plans.

There are a couple of options depending on when you bought the original typeface:

• If you bought v1 within six months from the release (starting from 1st of April 2022), the upgrade is free for you and you can complete it at the orders page. The free upgrade is towards the same tier. Note that for the personal plan, the upgrade is called Basic now due to a naming change.

• If you bought v1 longer than six months ago from 1st of April 2022, you’ll get a 50% discount to the same tier. Complete the upgrade at the orders page.

If you decide not to upgrade, you still have access to the original typeface and the associated features (i.e., the customize tool). It simply won’t receive any updates. The discount is perpetual and you may redeem it at any time.

The orders are managed by Paddle. Get in touch with Paddle support regarding changing the email address and provide your new email to them so they can change it for you.

Yes, no problem.

The exact weights have been listed below:

• Basic – Regular (400), Bold (700). The plan is available in ttf.

• Plus – Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), SemiBold (600), SemiBold (700). The plan is available in ttf.

• Complete – Thin (100), ExtraLight (200), Light (300), Regular (400), Medium (500), SemiBold (600), Bold (700), ExtraBold (800), Black (900). On top of this, the Complete version is available in a variable format (no fixed weight). The plan is available in both ttf and woff2 for web usage.

You can download your purchases package at the orders page.

Settings & usage

MonoLisa currently supports following languages:

1. Abenaki

2. Afaan Oromo

3. Afar

4. Afrikaans

5. Albanian

6. Alsatian

7. Amis

8. Anuta

9. Aragonese

10. Aranese

11. Aromanian

12. Arrernte

13. Arvanitic

14. Asturian

15. Atayal

16. Aymara

17. Azerbaijani

18. Bashkir

19. Basque

20. Belarusian

21. Bemba

22. Bikol

23. Bislama

24. Bosnian

25. Breton

26. Bulgarian Romanization

27. Cape Verdean

28. Catalan

29. Cebuano

30. Chamorro

31. Chavacano

32. Chichewa

33. Chickasaw

34. Chinese Pinyin

35. Cimbrian

36. Cofan

37. Cornish

38. Corsican

39. Crimean Tatar

40. Croatian

41. Czech

42. Danish

43. Dawan

44. Delaware

45. Dholuo

46. Drehu

47. Dutch

48. English

49. Esperanto

50. Estonian

51. Faroese

52. Fijian

53. Filipino

54. Finnish

55. Folkspraak

56. French

57. Frisian

58. Friulian

59. Gagauz

60. Galician

61. Ganda

62. Genoese

63. German

64. Gikuyu

65. Gooniyandi

66. Greek

67. Greenlandic

68. Guadeloupean

69. Gwichin

70. Haitian Creole

71. Han

72. Hawaiian

73. Hiligaynon

74. Hopi

75. Hotcak

76. Hungarian

77. Icelandic

78. Ido

79. Igbo

80. Ilocano

81. Indonesian

82. Interglossa

83. Interlingua

84. Irish

85. Istroromanian

86. Italian

87. Jamaican

88. Javanese

89. Jerriais

90. Kaingang

91. Kala Lagaw Ya

92. Kapampangan

93. Kaqchikel

94. Karakalpak

95. Karelian

96. Kashubian

97. Kikongo

98. Kinyarwanda

99. Kiribati

100. Kirundi

101. Klingon

102. Kurdish

103. Ladin

104. Latin

105. Latino Sine

106. Latvian

107. Lithuanian

108. Lojban

109. Lombard

110. Low Saxon

111. Luxembourgish

112. Maasai

113. Makhuwa

114. Malay

115. Maltese

116. Manx

117. Maori

118. Marquesan

119. Meglenoromanian

120. Meriam Mir

121. Mirandese

122. Mohawk

123. Moldovan

124. Montagnais

125. Montenegrin

126. Murrinhpatha

127. Nagamese Creole

128. Nahuatl

129. Ndebele

130. Neapolitan

131. Ngiyambaa

132. Niuean

133. Noongar

134. Norwegian

135. Novial

136. Occidental

137. Occitan

138. Old Icelandic

139. Old Norse

140. Oshiwambo

141. Ossetian

142. Palauan

143. Papiamento

144. Piedmontese

145. Pinyin

146. Polish

147. Portuguese

148. Potawatomi

149. Qeqchi

150. Quechua

151. Rarotongan

152. Romanian

153. Romansh

154. Rotokas

155. Russian

156. Sami

157. Sami Inari

158. Sami Lule

159. Sami Northern

160. Sami Southern

161. Samoan

162. Sango

163. Saramaccan

164. Sardinian

165. Scottish Gaelic

166. Serbian

167. Seri

168. Seychellois

169. Shawnee

170. Shona

171. Sicilian

172. Silesian

173. Slovak

174. Slovenian

175. Slovio

176. Somali

177. Sorbian Lower

178. Sorbian Upper

179. Sotho Northern

180. Sotho Southern

181. Spanish

182. Sranan

183. Sundanese

184. Swahili

185. Swazi

186. Swedish

187. Tagalog

188. Tahitian

189. Tetum

190. Tok Pisin

191. Tokelauan

192. Tongan

193. Tshiluba

194. Tsonga

195. Tswana

196. Tumbuka

197. Turkish

198. Turkmen

199. Tuvaluan

200. Tzotzil

201. Ukrainian

202. Uzbek

203. Venetian

204. Vepsian

205. Vietnamese

206. Volapuk

207. Voro

208. Wallisian

209. Walloon

210. Waraywaray

211. Warlpiri

212. Wayuu

213. Welsh

214. Wikmungkan

215. Wiradjuri

216. Wolof

217. Xavante

218. Xhosa

219. Yapese

220. Yindjibarndi

221. Zapotec

222. Zarma

223. Zazaki

224. Zulu

225. Zuni

To debug why the script variant (ss02) doesn’t work or show up, follow the steps below:

1. Make sure both normal and italic versions are installed to your system. It’s the italic version that includes ss02.

2. To see ss02 in action, make sure to use text with italics applied to it as otherwise it won’t render. Depending on the editor, you may have to change the font for comments or the code feature where you want to use ss02.

3. If you use VS Code, make sure to use the non-customized version (i.e., download without customizing). You can find more specific instructions below at the VS Code section on how to do this and how to enable ss02 then.

4. If in doubt, use fontdrop to verify that the feature is available in the version you downloaded. After dropping the italic version there, you should see a toggle for ss02. After pressing it, you should see the script variant applied to the sample. If you froze the feature through customization, it should be enabled by default.

You can download the latest version in “My orders” section by providing the email you used during the checkout and the order number.

You can download the latest version in “My orders” section by providing the email you used during the checkout and the order number.

You can download the latest version in “My orders” section by providing the email you used during the checkout and the order number.

Before installation, make sure to remove any possible earlier version of MonoLisa to avoid potential issues between different versions (esp. 1 and 2).

Windows

See installing fonts on Windows

Linux

Please refer to the documentation of your Linux distribution.

iPad/iPhone

Please use an application like Fontcase to import the font assets from iCloud or Dropbox and then apply the profile through Settings app. This blog post explains the process in more detail.

macOs

To install:

1. Select and open all downloaded files (.ttf)

2. Click on “Install font”

To uninstall:

1. Open Font Book.app

2. Find MonoLisa using search

3. Right-click on it and choose Remove “MonoLisa” Family

4. Empty trash bin

To update:

1. Download the latest version of the font from the orders page

2. Remove the old version of the font using Font Book.app

3. Install the newer version of the font

You might need to restart your computer to see the newer version of the font in your editor. If that doesn’t work, please see next question.

To clear the font cache:

1. Run the following in Terminal.app

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sudo atsutil databases -remove
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping

1. Restart your computer

2. Re-install the font (see previous question)

Please refer to these instructions if you still can’t update the font.

Generally put, the editor support for special features included in MonoLisa is weak. VS Code documented below is an exception to this rule. For the rest, it’s preferable to use the customize tool to generate a typeface that makes sense for your use case.

The same goes for terminals as majority of them don’t expose many font features and you are lucky if you can toggle ligatures.

Design software tends to have better support (esp. Adobe products, Figma, and Affinity Designer). For something more presentation oriented, such as Pages, using the customize tool is the way to go again.

Nerd Fonts is a popular collection of icons that can be patched to a font you use and the same process works with MonoLisa.

Consider using either of the following tools:

• daylinmorgan/monolisa-nerdfonts-patch

• betaboon/nerd-fonts-patcher

To avoid so called backtick issue, make sure you are using at least version 2.2.2 of Nerd Fonts.

It’s possible to avoid patching altogether using a font called Symbols Nerd Font (mono) as a fallback. The setup works for at least the Kitty terminal and VS Code and it’s described in this issue comment.

Some OpenType features of MonoLisa are optional and they are hidden behind stylistic sets. At the moment, editor support for the feature is unfortunately poor.

VS Code

In VS Code the example below, we enable calt glyphs (space alterations), disable ligatures (liga), enable the alternate zero (zero) and the script variant (ss02) at settings.json:

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{
  "editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on, 'liga' off, 'zero' on, 'ss02' on"
}

The editor.fontLigatures accepts standard CSS.

Other programs

To mitigate the problem for the rest of the programs, additionally you can customize your font before downloading it (plus plan or above). This allows removing ligatures or enabling script variant by default for any editor.

For the basic edition, please use fonttools-opentype-feature-freezer, MuTsunTsai/fontfreeze, or a comparable tool.

For editors that don’t support stylistic sets, please use fonttools-opentype-feature-freezer, MuTsunTsai/fontfreeze, or a comparable tool to freeze zero to the font.

Both superscript and subscript versions of numbers are included by default and visible at the specimen page. The page also includes their UTF codes and Stack Overflow provides help on how to type them.

It’s important to note that the script glyphs have been defined only for the Italic variant of the typeface, not Normal. You can verify this behavior by looking at the specimen page.

Depending on your display and sight, you could set the size even down to 11. It’s good to have `anti-aliased` on and set `Use ligatures` based on your preference.

Example below:

Use the following configuration (adjust font name to match the one on your system):

kitty.conf:

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# ref: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.font_features
font_features MonoLisa-Medium +zero +ss04 +ss07 +ss08 +ss09
font_features MonoLisa-MediumItalic +zero +ss04 +ss07 +ss08 +ss09

See this GitHub comment for a script.

Go to Preferences → Editor → Font and set the font to MonoLisa. Adjust the remaining options to your liking.

Make sure you are using the non-customized version with VS Code as it’s not needed there. You can customize which font features are used through configuration:

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{
    "editor.fontFamily": "MonoLisa",
    // When lineHeight is set to zero, VS Code will figure out the
    // the height automatically based on the font
    "editor.lineHeight": 0,
    // You can use standard CSS syntax here. To enable
    // ss01 for example, you could set "'ss01' on"
    "editor.fontLigatures": true,
    "editor.fontSize": 12
}

Note that if you have customized the name and use a whitespace in it, it’s preferable to escape the name (i.e., "'MonoLisa Custom'"). See the font-family CSS rule for specifics.

Make sure you are using the non-customized version with VS Code as it’s not needed there.

To make the script variant work, make sure ss02 is enabled and that italic font style is being applied to your theme. The configuration below does this globally for VS Code:

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{
  "editor.fontLigatures": "'ss02' on",
  "editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
    "textMateRules": [
      {
        "scope": "comment",
        "settings": {
          "fontStyle": "italic"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

See the related Stack Overflow question for more information and the customize-ui VS Code plugin.

In order to alter the font weight, you should use the editor.fontWeight field like this:

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{
    // This works for both fixed weights and variable
    "editor.fontFamily": "MonoLisa",
    "editor.fontWeight": 400,
    // If you are using the variable version, set fontVariations: true
    // After setting this, you can use any fontWeight between 100 and 900
    "editor.fontVariations": true
}

Adjust the number based on the fonts you own. 400 is regular and the rest are with 100 increments (300 for light for example and 700 for bold). There’s more information about variable fonts in VS Code in this issue.

If the default line height of MonoLisa feels too roomy for you, try adjusting it in VS Code like this:

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{
  "editor.lineHeight": 16
}

Tweak the number till it looks good to you. You can use zero to use the default measurement to compare.