Your internationalization issue makes no sense at all to me: this isn't about making everything the same width, as these are explicitly proportional fonts... th

Your internationalization issue makes no sense at all to me: this isn't about making everything the same width, as these are explicitly proportional fonts... the mechanism is merely that if you have an italic or bold version of the font that you won't get weird "popping" or layout changes. You are also slamming hard the idea that this would ever be interesting, and yet almost every single communication app I've ever used has chosen to use bold to mean "unread", and it definitely makes sense that if you click on something to read it it shouldn't pop or cause a layout change.