When comparing Google Noto vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Google Noto for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Google Noto is ranked 92nd while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Google Noto is:
Glyph design on Noto Sans is well designed and accounts for HiDPI and standard displays.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Optimized for a large variety of displays
Glyph design on Noto Sans is well designed and accounts for HiDPI and standard displays.
Pro Open-source
Licensed and distributed under the SIL Open Font License.
Pro Retina-ready
Looks very clean and crisp on retina displays.
Pro Simple and yet beautiful
Simple and beautiful - much like the Windows counterparts such as Calibri and Arial but it's native for Linux and for this reason it looks better than these two with anti-aliasing.
Pro Expansive character set
Noto Sans is one of the most comprehensive fonts in the market, covering an estimated 30+ languages backed by Google.
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 Font pack might be too large
Because it is so comprehensive, the TTF/OTF packages in ZIP is really large.
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.