When comparing Anonymous Pro vs 6x13 fixed, the Slant community recommends Anonymous Pro for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Anonymous Pro is ranked 9th while 6x13 fixed is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Anonymous Pro is:
Anonymous Pro is easily legible at small sizes as a bitmap font.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Readable even at small sizes
Anonymous Pro is easily legible at small sizes as a bitmap font.
Pro The best rendering character for DIGIT ONE
Pro Clashing characters are clearly distinguishable
Characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code.
Pro Well designed
6x13 fixed is the apex of bitmap fonts. It has a nice, defined character set and great proportions for quantity of text onscreen, making for excellent readability. It is aesthetically pleasing for a bitmap font and has been deservedly termed 'classic'.
Pro Legible at small sizes
At a small text size, each character has a limited resolution. A character size of 6x13 pixels means only 78 pixels per character. Modern fonts are designed to be scalable and are less legible at these small sizes. Using bitmap fonts increases legibility by eliminating scaling and sub-pixel aliasing artifacts. Some scalable fonts include "ppems" embedded bitmaps for this reason.
Pro Available on every X server
6x13 is the classic fixed monospace bitmap font that is expected to be available on every X server. It is part of the misc-fixed family. These fonts were handcrafted for readability in a terminal.
Pro Widely available
It is distributed alongside the X Window System.
Cons
Con Small 'l' (ell) is too similar to big 'I' (Eye)
You can tell the difference but need to concentrate on the letters.
See the word "Illegal" as an example.
It would be better if serifs are a little bit wider for the big 'I' (Eye) letter.
Con Smaller than other monospace fonts
Con Small punctuation makes readability difficult
In some programs it's hard to see punctuation marks, especially periods and colons.
Con Smaller then other monospaced fonts
Size 13 of Source Code Pro is slightly larger then size 14 of Anonymous Pro.
Con "0" glitch
The 0 (zero) symbol has a 'dent' on the left.
Con Exaggerated italics
The italicized version of the font is too slanted, meaning that italicized comments in code look really unbalanced.
Con Hard to distinguish [ and {
Braces [] and {} are very similar.
Con Doesn't have a slashed zero
The absence of non-slashed zeroes makes it harder to distinguish "0" from the letter "O".
Con Extremely small on high-DPI screens
While it is crafted for a screen where the pixels are visible, bitmap fonts do not work well on high-DPI screens as they do not scale too well.