When comparing Dalton Maag Ubuntu Mono vs Apple Menlo, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while Dalton Maag Ubuntu Mono is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Apple Menlo is:
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Excellent readability
Line thickness, shape, and spacing help you to recognize characters and words correctly the first time through, without your eyes having to skip back and re-read.
Pro Pleasant aesthetics
The font has a rounded, smooth aesthetic that is particularly appealing.
Pro Easily distinguishable characters
There are dotted zeroes in Ubuntu Mono so to distinguish from the letter "O" (Oh), while the lowercase letter "l" (ell) is very different from the number "1" (one).
Pro Legible even at small sizes
The fonts retain legibility and under subpixel rendering at small sizes.
Pro Many languages
1,200 glyphs, 200-250 languages (native languages of 3 billion people).
Pro Open source font
SIL Open Font License.
Pro Great readability
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Characters are very readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols such as various kinds of brackets are made easily discernible from each other and various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.
Pro Clear differentiations
I, I, L, l, 1, O, 0, etc.
Cons
Con Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)
Same with Hack and Red Hat Mono.
Con Many characters seem imbalanced
Some of the characters don't feel like they match well which can be distracting.
Con The font is too small
Ubuntu's 13pt looks like 10pt of another font.
Con Lowercase "m" is weird and stands out
The lowercase "m" in Ubuntu Mono really stands out because of its unusual shape, which disrupts the user's attention when reading.
Con Dotted zero characters less distinguishable
Dotted zero characters are much less distinguishable than those that are slashed.
Con No support for combined unicode characters
For example, x̄ is rendered as x ̄.
Con No bold version
This is not so great on a dark IDE, the characters tend to wash out, unlike something like Consolas.
Con Seems too wide at size 16
The letters become quite wide at size 16, impacting upon readability.
Con Doesn't work at size 10
Menlo displays as expected for size 11 and bigger, but doesn't seem to work very well at size 10. Issues include zero not being the same height as the rest of the numbers and Parenthetical Brackets not matching up perfectly.