Provide version without Nerd Fonts

[dhruvkb]

Nerd Fonts are great, I use them all the time. But the scaled-down single-cell version of Nerd Fonts included in Monaspace has extremely small icons which are just harder to read. I'd much rather use Monaspace without the Nerd Fonts and fall back to the standalone Nerd Font symbols font for the icons.

I used to do that earlier, but can't anymore because Monaspace now includes those glyphs and the application doesn't use the fallback.

I brought this up here (#24 (comment)) and another comment (#24 (comment)) also suggested that it makes sense to ship a version without Nerd Fonts because of the extra size they add to the font files.

[heathercran]

Hi @dhruvkb! I totally understand what you mean. We had to make a call on how many different versions of the fonts we make, as we didn't want to have so many options that it would just be confusing. The Frozen versions of the Monaspace fonts do not include Nerd Fonts, so you'd be safe to use those instead and fall back to Nerd Fonts like you're used to!

[Finii]

If you are on a system with fontconfig (i.e. Linux) you can put a rule that the Symbols are taken from the SymbolsOnly font ignoring Monaspace's NerdFont glyphs. If your client obeys fontconfig.

On the other hand, your solution means the scaling can work or not, some icons will be scaled suboptimal. MonaspiceNF (the variant with bigger icons, not NFM) is maybe helpful.

[dhruvkb]

I'm on macOS, and I'm not too keen on messing with fontconfig rules, especially if doing so leads to inconsistent output among my various applications based on whether they support it or not.

But @heathercran's workaround works for me (thanks!) in the absence of a Nerd Font-free version as I had already enabled all stylistic sets and was using the frozen font in JetBrains IDEs anyways. Now I can just use that everywhere. An added benefit is not having to enable each feature individually.