But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.
A font snob wouldn’t ask this question :)
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
[0] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/typ...
At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.