When comparing MT OCR A Extended vs Inconsolata, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata is ranked 52nd while MT OCR A Extended is ranked 116th. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata is:
The characters in Inconsolata have a slightly "wide" appearance that aids in readability, especially at small font sizes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to distinguish characters
You can clearly tell the difference between those troublesome characters like apostrophes and quotes. Each character is clearly (there's that word again) different from each other to make machine reading easier and work for humans as well.
Pro Characters readable even at small sizes
The characters in Inconsolata have a slightly "wide" appearance that aids in readability, especially at small font sizes.
Pro Excellent readability
Very clear, distinct characters with decent spacing make Inconsolata very readable.
Pro Efficient scalability
Inconsolata scales well without loss of readability.
Pro Slashed zero characters are distinguishable from capital "O" and "Q" characters
Inconsolata-g screws this up by replacing the slashed zero with a dotted zero. A dotted zero is better than a zero with nothing in it, but worse than a slashed zero.
Pro Open source
It's an open source font, meaning it's freely available.
Pro No visible character breaks
Inconsolata renders lines in TUIs without visible character breaks; apparently unlike Inconsolata-g.
Pro Widely available
Inconsolata is available in the package managers of almost every open source OS.
Cons
Con Arched braces
Too much arched braces, decreases clarity, touching characters almost.