When comparing Apple Menlo vs Tiny Font, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while Tiny Font is ranked 128th. 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 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.
Pro Legible at extremely small point sizes
Tiny Font stands at just 4 pixels short (5 with descenders), yet includes every printable ASCII character.
Cons
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.
Con Pointless to use this for legibility unless you're on an exceptionally small screen device
The tiny point size does not scale well. It's designed for a singular purpose and does well for that, but unless you're working around those limitations the poor readability will slow down your work.
Con Not as pretty as other fonts
Other options look better than Tiny Font at bigger sizes.