When comparing Panic Sans vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Panic Sans for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Panic Sans is ranked 36th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Panic Sans is:
Like its parent DejaVu and grandparent Bitstream Vera, this has tall and easily read letters.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Tall and legible
Like its parent DejaVu and grandparent Bitstream Vera, this has tall and easily read letters.
Pro Clearly distinguishes clashing characters
Panic Sans has added uniqueness for characters that are easily confused, such as "0" and "O", "l" and "1".
Pro Clarity and appealing to the eye
There is great line spacing and italics in Panic Sans.
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 Line spacing is small
This is a "pro" to me but some folks dislike the smaller space between lines (which is why it raises the underscore, which might otherwise vanish).
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.