This article is part 2 of a series I’m writing about Monoid. I recommend you start by reading part 1 if you haven’t already. I’m @larsenwork on Medium, Twitter and GitHub.

B̷a̷s̷h̷i̷n̷g̷

I’m comparing Monoid to other fonts and I’ll point out things I’ve chosen to do differently based on the priorities discussed in part 1 — legibility, compact and pretty.

When another font has opted for a different solution it’s not necessarily bad but simply based on other priorities or the fact that the font has a different style.

The importance of discernibility

We don’t want typos messing up our code We often “scan” quickly through the code sometimes looking for a special letter We code at small font sizes where letters can be more difficult to tell apart

Examples

I’ll show a bunch of examples and try to explain any terminology along the way.

The order is the same in all images: Monoid, Pragmata Pro, Fira Mono and Source Code Pro.

N.B.

I’m showing these images a blown up sizes because it makes it easier to spot the details. They should really be judged at your prefered coding size.

Monoid currently has 12 built in style sets so many of the characters discussed below — e.g. dollar and zero — has alternate versions should you prefer those.