When comparing 6x13 fixed vs M+ 1 Code, the Slant community recommends M+ 1 Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” M+ 1 Code is ranked 8th while 6x13 fixed is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose M+ 1 Code is:
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Well designed
6x13 fixed is the apex of bitmap fonts. It has a nice, defined character set and great proportions for quantity of text onscreen, making for excellent readability. It is aesthetically pleasing for a bitmap font and has been deservedly termed 'classic'.
Pro Legible at small sizes
At a small text size, each character has a limited resolution. A character size of 6x13 pixels means only 78 pixels per character. Modern fonts are designed to be scalable and are less legible at these small sizes. Using bitmap fonts increases legibility by eliminating scaling and sub-pixel aliasing artifacts. Some scalable fonts include "ppems" embedded bitmaps for this reason.
Pro Available on every X server
6x13 is the classic fixed monospace bitmap font that is expected to be available on every X server. It is part of the misc-fixed family. These fonts were handcrafted for readability in a terminal.
Pro Widely available
It is distributed alongside the X Window System.
Pro Permissive free software licence
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Pro Narrow font is great for teaching
M+ 1m allows you to fit much more code on slides yet still have them be highly legible, making it a great choice for teaching.
Pro 17 different character-encodings available
- ISO-8859-1, Latin-1 Western European
- ISO-8859-2, Latin-2 Central European
- ISO-8859-3, Latin-3 South European
- ISO-8859-4, Latin-4 North European
- ISO-8859-5, Latin/Cyrillic
- ISO-8859-7, Latin/Greek
- ISO-8859-8, Latin/Hebrew
- ISO-8859-9, Latin-5 Turkish
- ISO-8859-10, Latin-6 Nordic
- ISO-8859-13, Latin-7 Baltic Rim
- ISO-8859-14, Latin-8 Celtic
- ISO-8859-15, Latin-9 A revision of 8859-1
- ISO-8859-16, Latin-10 South-Eastern European
- T1 Encoding, Default 8-bit encoding in many TeX installations
- Windows-1252, Used by default in the legacy components of MS Windows
- WGL4, Pan-European character set defined by Microsoft
- VISCII, Vietnamese standard character set
Pro Five weights from Thin to Bold
The five font weights available are thin, light, regular, medium, and bold.
Pro Works well with Japanese
The widths are half that of the Japanese characters in the font.
Pro High legibility
M+ M Type-1 (1M) was created to emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility.
Cons
Con Doesn't have a slashed zero
The absence of non-slashed zeroes makes it harder to distinguish "0" from the letter "O".
Con Extremely small on high-DPI screens
While it is crafted for a screen where the pixels are visible, bitmap fonts do not work well on high-DPI screens as they do not scale too well.
Con Top narrow
Con Certain pseudo-graphic characters take two spaces
In this font, some pseudo-graphic characters can take up two spaces instead of one.