When comparing PragmataPro vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends PragmataPro for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” PragmataPro is ranked 21st while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose PragmataPro is:
The compact design of the fonts allows for effective editing in 2-3 windows side-by-side, even on a laptop screen.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Narrow width saves a lot of space
The compact design of the fonts allows for effective editing in 2-3 windows side-by-side, even on a laptop screen.
Pro Comprehensive Unicode character support
PragmataPro, more so than most fonts (even non-monospace, professional fonts etc.), supports over 10,000 glyphs of the Unicode standard; many of those symbols, letters, and special characters are quite useful in writing and programming (e.g. PragmataPro + Vim's conceal feature makes writing LaTeX pretty beautiful).
Pro Very clear and legible
The font has been hand-hinted with legibility in mind.
Pro Has ligatures
This is useful for those using letters that are joined, such as "æ".
Pro Most complete
The font has the most glyphs of any programming fonts (more than 7.000).
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 Can be expensive
The cost for the bold font is $20 and this can get as high as $225 for the full package.
Con "Bold" is more like heavy/black rather than bold
If you use bold to highlight keywords, you may find that bold version of the font is too bold and disrupts the flow of the text. Bold is heavily used by many IDEs, so you may need to adjust code highlighting settings and use other means of highlighting keywords, or maybe choosing a different color for bolded words.
Con Crowded-looking
Pragmata Pro is quite crowded in appearance, making it rather unattractive.
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.
