When comparing Monoid vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends Monoid for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Monoid is ranked 19th while MonoLisa is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Monoid is:
The user can adjust letter-spacing, line-height, and choose alternate characters prior to downloading.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Customisable
The user can adjust letter-spacing, line-height, and choose alternate characters prior to downloading.
Pro Novel use of ligatures to display ascii character combinations as symbols
The common expression '!=' is displayed as '≠', '>=' as '≥' *, while maintaining the fixed width double-space that these characters would normally take, so as to maintain text alignment.
- Many others are supported too - see site for details.
Pro Open source
Monoid is open source meaning it's freely available to anyone.
Pro Sharpness
Pro Larger and easier to read with thin condensed letters
Pro Fine without retina
Probably the only one that is.
Pro Customizable OpenType features downloads
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Pro Script variant
It comes with script variant for italics.
Pro Ligatures
The typeface supports over 120 optionally enabled ligatures for common coding tasks.
Pro Italics
The typeface comes with an italic version.
Pro Space
Space used by the characters has been carefully balanced to keep them light to read.
Pro Reading flow
The characters have been designed to flow into each other so that the font feels easy to read.
Pro Distinction
Specific care has been put to make programming characters such as 1, i, and l or O or 0 easy to tell apart.
Pro Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means there's more space for designing characters like "m".
Cons
Con Very narrow
Con No bold-italic style
Monoid doesn't offer a style that is both bold and italic.
Con Not free
This font requires a purchase in order to be used. The cheapest version ('Basic') is 60 dollars. There is a free trial, though.
Con Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means a short adjustment period may be required. If you have a limited amount of horizontal space, the wider glyphs may be problematic as well.