👍 Nice work! I had no idea my version of Vegur was novel. Sorry, if I'd known I could have given you mine (though I can't remember where it came from). For the record:

$ md5sum ~/.local/share/fonts/Vegur-Regular.otf 
6e0aea27ff3e8fd96519da4001251a4c  /home/tim/.local/share/fonts/Vegur-Regular.otf

(ctime Feb 10, 2013)

And yes, your assumption is correct - I manually adjusted the spacing / scale to make the text a little tighter packed, the default spacing looked a bit loose to me.

I tried this locally, it took me a while to figure out how to get the built font to load though. Perhaps you could add a hint? env XDG_DATA_HOME=(pwd)/result/share inkscape ../nixos.text.svg worked for me (from inside the font directory).

Oh, and eog (default gnome viewer) ends up picking a light font for some reason. Inkscape gets it right though. I made a copy and deleted the "Vegur-L" otf file, and that made it pick up the right font. I don't know the technicalities of how font matching is done in SVGs, but I guess as a hack you could delete the L variant in the build phase 🤷‍♂️

(I cheated and copied the built font to ~/.local/share/fonts)

As for the wrong font being picked up, I'm treating this as a non-issue. I should add a note that the svg file is intended for use with inkscape only, to use the baked-in vectors instead. Not only eog would take the wrong font, but using the text-based version would fail spectacularly on the web since the user probably won't have the font.

As for the file you have, it's vegur 0.701. It doesn't match:

The green parts are the baked-in outlines, and the black is Vegur (0.701) as rendered by inkscape

Doing the same exercise with Vegur 602 and 601 results only in minor fringing due to antialiasing.

Either you updated your font since creating the logo, or another user used an earlier version when baking-in the outlines.