When comparing Anonymous Pro vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends Anonymous Pro for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Anonymous Pro is ranked 6th while MonoLisa is ranked 63rd. 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 Customizable OpenType features downloads
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Pro Script variant
It comes with script variant for italics.
Pro Ligatures
The typeface supports over 120 optionally enabled ligatures for common coding tasks.
Pro Italics
The typeface comes with an italic version.
Pro Space
Space used by the characters has been carefully balanced to keep them light to read.
Pro Reading flow
The characters have been designed to flow into each other so that the font feels easy to read.
Pro Distinction
Specific care has been put to make programming characters such as 1, i, and l or O or 0 easy to tell apart.
Pro Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means there's more space for designing characters like "m".
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 Not free
This font requires a purchase in order to be used. The cheapest version ('Basic') is 60 dollars. There is a free trial, though.
Con Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means a short adjustment period may be required. If you have a limited amount of horizontal space, the wider glyphs may be problematic as well.
