When comparing Monofur vs Google Noto, the Slant community recommends Monofur for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Monofur is ranked 35th while Google Noto is ranked 92nd.
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 Optimized for a large variety of displays
Glyph design on Noto Sans is well designed and accounts for HiDPI and standard displays.
Pro Open-source
Licensed and distributed under the SIL Open Font License.
Pro Retina-ready
Looks very clean and crisp on retina displays.
Pro Simple and yet beautiful
Simple and beautiful - much like the Windows counterparts such as Calibri and Arial but it's native for Linux and for this reason it looks better than these two with anti-aliasing.
Pro Expansive character set
Noto Sans is one of the most comprehensive fonts in the market, covering an estimated 30+ languages backed by Google.
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 Font pack might be too large
Because it is so comprehensive, the TTF/OTF packages in ZIP is really large.