When comparing Inconsolata-g vs Dina, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata-g for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata-g is ranked 5th while Dina is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata-g is:
Inconsolata-g has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Inconsolata-g has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Pro Fixes clashing of similar characters
Inconsolata-g is a variant of the popular Inconsolata that fixes the similarity between "1" [one] and the "l" [lowercase ell].
Pro Great scalability
Inconsolata mantains its legibility even with small font sizes.
Pro Line height is a little larger than normal
This makes the lines feel less crowded which greatly helps readability.
Pro Great appearance
Dina is compact, sharp, and easy to read.
Pro Compact yet readable
One of the most compact fonts while still being readable. More lines on screen while still passing basic readability check than Consolas, Courier new, Cascadia Mono, Hack, and Crisp. 8, 9, and 10 point are all fantastic.
Pro A really clean programming font
Neat and simple.
Cons
Con No Italics
To improve contrast, italics are best used for comments.
Con () and {} are difficult to distinguish
The user may have difficulty distinguishing small size () and {} at a glance.
Con No pretty ligatures
Ligatures are nice-to-have in languages such as Swift.
Con Looks too small next to other fonts
Con Character widths are not consistent between regular and bold
Bold characters are not the same width as regular characters so the typeface is not consistently monospace.
Con Dotted zero
Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero.
Con Looks significantly worse on Windows (ClearType)
Con Renders lines as dashes in TUI interfaces
Lines in items like midnight commander, the treeview in htop, tmux panes, the tree command, et al., have ugly dashed lines instead of straight lines with sharp corners.
Con Requires more work than Inconsolata to install on several OS's
Because Inconsolata is in the package managers for almost all open source OS's, it is much easier to install than Inconsolata-g in most cases.
Con Bitmap only
Only available in bitmap (unless you find that one dude who converted it into a .ttf).
Con 8, 9, and 10pt only
Limited font size options.