When comparing Google Droid Sans Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Google Droid Sans Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Google Droid Sans Mono is ranked 24th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Google Droid Sans Mono is:
Feels very easy to read code, even in a very small px (like 10 or 9). Letters are slightly separated, l (ell) and 1 are different, " (opening and closing quote) is straight and not angled, and the "Zero Slashed" version makes it an excellent font for coding.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Makes code very easy to read, especially if using the version where zeroes are slashed
Feels very easy to read code, even in a very small px (like 10 or 9). Letters are slightly separated, l (ell) and 1 are different, " (opening and closing quote) is straight and not angled, and the "Zero Slashed" version makes it an excellent font for coding.
Pro Size and spacing are excellent for readability
Very easy to scan through code. Large character size for fonts of the same type size.
Pro Looks neat
Droid Sans Mono looks beautiful. The only disadvantage is that there's no italics or bold.
Pro Excellent support for Unicode characters
Unicode uses 16 bits per character, meaning that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Cons
Con Zero is not slashed or dotted
This can make it hard to distinguish the letter "O" from the number "0".
Con Superceded by Google Noto Sans Mono
Con Zero is difficult to identify
As it's not dotted or slashed, "0" is more difficult to distinguish.
Con Non-monospace ligature replacements for 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'
By default, the substrings 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', and 'ffi' are each crammed into one character width, making it not a truly monospace font. For example, the word 'flag' is rendered as three characters wide.
Con Letters capital 'i' and lowercase 'L' are too similar
The only difference is almost unnoticable.
Con Difficult to distinguish between a period and acomma as well as a colon and a semi-colon
Comma has very small tail, making it difficult to distinguish from a period (full stop). Same applies to colon and semi-colon.