Fun story.

The Ministry of Education was using MS Gothic for printed student transcripts. To help students send transcripts directly to post-secondary schools, the Ministry wanted to shift from paper to digital copies. This meant producing a PDF file that had like-for-like characteristics with the printed copy.

Legally, Microsoft requires licensing MS Gothic if the font is used in server-side generated documents. I raised this issue with the Ministry as part of my work in recreating the transcripts. MS Gothic proved to be cost-prohibitive and I suggested they used Raph Levien's unencumbered Inconsolata Zero instead, which is a near-perfect drop-in replacement for MS Gothic and drew inspiration from Letter Gothic.

Now, the stakeholders for the Ministry of Education are extremely protective of the transcript format and there was a subtle, but important difference: The Ministry wanted a non-decorated zero whereas Inconsolata Zero's is slashed. That would not fly with the Ministry.

I, a complete stranger, emailed Raph. The next day, he asked Alexei Vanyashin to set up a custom version of Inconsolata Zero. Alexei went above and beyond to fix all the issues I encountered and about eight days later we had a free replacement for Inconsolata Zero without a dotted zero that passed Ministry scrutiny.

Hard to believe that that was nine years ago.

Aside, my coworkers got a kick of watching me walk down the hall from the printer back to my desk holding two overlapping pieces of paper up to the lights: an official student transcript and my version. This was the technique I used to make sure that the PDF file produced a pixel-perfect replica on paper.