When comparing Monofur vs Fantasque Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Fantasque Sans Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fantasque Sans Mono is ranked 27th while Monofur is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Fantasque Sans Mono is:
The handwritten-style italics of Fantasque Sans Mono are quite attractive.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro It's simple, beautiful, and stylish
Pro Great for your eyes
Monofur is very legible. Even after staring at it for hours, your eyes won't get tired.
Pro Letterforms are highly distinct
The font is very legible due to the distinguished characters it contains.
Pro Italics look good
The handwritten-style italics of Fantasque Sans Mono are quite attractive.
Pro Open source
Fantasque Sans Mono is open source, meaning it can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone.
Pro Uniformity
As a "Mono" font, Fantasque is uniform in size and overalls. However, if you look further into all characters, you'll find that there's almost no pattern between them - except for the huge amount of curves. That said, this font is a very strong contender in terms of readability, especially in a world that seeks pattern (often too much).
An example:
Double single quotes vs single double quotes. In JavaScript code, you can find empty String initialization a lot. Unless syntax highlighting makes it clear, it's pretty hard with other fonts to spot the difference between double single quotes and single double quote.
Pro Support for various platforms
There's support for OS X, Linux, and Windows (otf, ttf) in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro No useless experiments with special characters
Pro Own personality
It looks distinct, playful. But don't cross the line when it becomes unusable.
Pro Lowercase "k" looks nice
Pro Glyphs support
This is good for those who wish to use different designs of a certain character.
Pro Has ligatures
Alpha version supports ligatures as Fira Code does.
Pro Truly compact
The Height line is quite short but coherent. You have to like the style but this is one of the most readable at a small size ( 9pts ).
Pro Cyrillic alphabet support
This is useful for those who wish to use letters from certain Eastern European or Asian alphabets.
Pro Webfonts included (eot, svg, woff)
Webfonts, such as eot, svg, and woff, are included in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro Powerline symbols
Cons
Con Lacks bold+italic
Monofur has a regular italic and bold typeface, but it lacks bold+italic. Syntax-capable editors can better display code based on function/class/context/markup work when at least 4 families are available to display.
Con Only characters from the Western charset work in many Windows apps
The font includes all characters for all European languages; however, in most programs using Unicode (such as WordPad or MS Word), only languages using Western charset can use this font. These include English, German, French, Spanish, and Norwegian.
Trying to use any languages like Czech, Hungarian (Central European), Bulgarian, Russian (Cyrillic), or Greek will make the font switch back to default font like Arial or Calibri, even though Monofur itself includes characters for those languages.
Authors didn't bother fixing the non-working Baltic / Central European / Greek / Cyrillic / Turkish character set for those years.
Con Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)
Same with Hack and Ubuntu Mono.
Con Lowercase "k" is ugly
The lowercase "k" seems like a strange "r" since it has a line that extends to the top of capital letters. There is currently a workaround aiming to correct this.
Con The size is too small
Letter size is smaller than other fonts at the same setting.