International monospaced font?

[OneOfTheDans]

I'm from the US, and for years, Courier New has been my go-to monospace font if I need multi-line strings to align, or fixed-width strings to exactly fill a control/indicator (e.g. console-style indicators, or hexadecimal controls/indicators).

I maintain a LabVIEW program that uses Courier New in some places for the reasons above. Recently, I demo'd the program in Japan, and was surprised to see Courier New, the font I know and love, is entirely different in Japan: spaces are not the same width as characters, and the entire font is larger (despite the same font-size setting).

How can the same exact font look so different between countries?

How do you deal with these international discrepancies?

How can I work around this?

Is there a standardized monospaced font I can use instead?

[PeterFoerster]

Can't answer all your questions, but there was an idea years ago that requested NI to standardize the font sizes, because they aren't right now. Here's the link:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Font-size-standardization/idi-p/1405022

A quick comparison between LabVIEW and Word on my PC suggests that NI hasn't gotten around to it yet.

[OneOfTheDans]

Wow! That's pretty bad. The root of that thread is that, for historic reasons, what NI calls "pt" is really "px", which is a bug. They say it's fixed in NXG 1.

The other problem I saw was with Courier New rendering spaces at a different width. Basically, the font wasn't truly monospaced on the Japanese computers.

There must be some way to work around these font limitations. I always thought a big draw of LabVIEW was its cross-platform compatibility. Any ideas how to work around this? Are there common "best practices" for portable UIs?

[billko]

You can probably blame this particular issue as much on Windows and localization and extended fonts as much as LabVIEW, although LabVIEW and font display general issues are legendary.

[OneOfTheDans]

Agreed - I first posted this assuming it was a Windows font localization problem. I expected a simple suggestion for a reliable, stable-sized monospace font, but the problem unfortunately seems to run deeper. I don't especially care where the blame lies, I'm just hoping for a solution other than "release for the US, manually change all the fonts & sizes throughout the front panels, release again for Japan".