meld says it uses "monospace regular", but shows a variable-width font

Question

I'm using meld 3.16.4 on a CentOS 7.x machine (yes, woe is me).

Now, the font meld uses for the text of the files it compares is a variable-width font, but - the preferences dialog says the font is "Monospace regular". I know what Monospace regular looks like on other systems - and it's not what I'm seeing from meld; the font I see is variable-space and sans serif.

What's going on and how can I fix this?

Answer 1

You probably don't have an appropriate fixed-width font installed on your system, which meld can use. You may be seeing something like this:

$ fc-match monospace
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

So that the "best match" for the word monospace is a non-monospace sans font.

If that's the case, try installing a Monospace font, e.g. with the Deja-Vu fonts, as root:

yum install dejavu-sans-mono-fonts dejavu-serif-fonts

and then you should see something like:

$ fc-match monospace
DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"

... and meld should now use that instead of the sans-serif font you were seeing.