Monaco (typeface)

Last updated
Monaco
MonacoSpecimen.svg
Category Sans-serif
Classification Monospace
Designer(s) Susan Kare
Foundry Apple Inc.

Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. It ships with macOS and was already present with all previous versions of the Mac operating system. Characters are distinct, and it is difficult to confuse 0 (figure zero) and O (uppercase O), or 1 (figure one), | (vertical bar), I (uppercase i) and l (lowercase L).[ citation needed ] A unique feature of the font is the high curvature of its parentheses as well as the width of its square brackets, the result of these being that an empty pair of parentheses or square brackets will strongly resemble a circle or square, respectively.

Contents

Monaco has been released in at least three forms. The original was a bitmap monospace font that still appears in the ROMs of even New World Macs, and is still available in recent macOS releases (size 9, with disabled antialiasing); this version did not have the above-mentioned distinguishing marks. The second is the outline form, loosely similar to Lucida Mono and created as a TrueType font for System 6 and 7; this is the standard font used for all other sizes. There was briefly a third known as MPW, since it was designed to be used with the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop IDE; it was essentially a straight conversion of the bitmap font into an outline font with the addition of some of the same disambiguation features as were added to the TrueType Monaco.

The original Monaco 9 point bitmap font was designed so that when a Compact Macintosh window was displayed full screen, such as for a terminal emulator program, it would result in a standard text user interface display of 80 columns by 25 lines. [1] [2]

With the August 2009 release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Menlo was introduced as the default monospaced font instead of Monaco in Terminal and Xcode, [3] However, Monaco remains a part of macOS. Monaco is the default font in the current Python IDLE when used on a Mac running OS X El Capitan.

Furthermore, in September 2015, Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan introduced SF Mono, a monospaced variant of the San Francisco font family, as the default monospaced font instead of Menlo.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typeface</span> Set of characters that share common design features

A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arial</span> Neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface

Arial is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitstream Vera</span> Typeface series from Bitstream

Vera is a digital typeface superfamily with a liberal license. It was designed by Jim Lyles from the now-defunct Bitstream Inc. type foundry, and it is closely based on Bitstream Prima, for which Lyles was also responsible. It is a TrueType font with full hinting instructions, which improve its rendering quality on low-resolution devices such as computer monitors. The font has also been repackaged as a Type 1 PostScript font, called Bera, for LaTeX users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Kare</span> American artist and graphic designer

Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Facebook, and Pinterest. As of 2023 Kare was an employee of Niantic Labs. As a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant designers of modern technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tahoma (typeface)</span> Humanist sans-serif font

Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Matthew Carter designed for Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft first distributed it, along with Carter's Verdana, as a computer font with Office 97.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicago (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface

Chicago is a sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare for Apple Computer. It was used in the Macintosh operating system user interface between 1984 and 1997 and was an important part of Apple’s brand identity. It is also used in early versions of the iPod user interface. Chicago was initially a bitmap font; as the Apple OS’s capabilities improved, Apple commissioned the type foundry Bigelow & Holmes to create a vector-based TrueType version. The typeface is named after the U.S. city of Chicago, following the theme of original Macintosh fonts being named after major world cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typography of Apple Inc.</span> Overview of typography of Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. uses a large variety of typefaces in its marketing, operating systems, and industrial design with each product cycle. These change throughout the years with Apple's change of style in their products. This is evident in the design and marketing of the company. The current logo is a white apple with a bite out of it, which was first utilized in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucida</span> Typeface family designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1984

Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slashed zero</span> Glyph variant of numeral 0 (zero) with slash

The dotted or slashed zero 0̷ is a representation of the Arabic digit "0" (zero) with a slash through it. The slashed zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming, and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punch card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucida Grande</span> Font

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like Safari for Windows. As of OS X Yosemite, the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue. In OS X El Capitan the system font changed again, this time to San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ProFont</span> Monospace typeface

ProFont is a monospace font available in many formats. It is intended to be used for programming in IDE environments and it is available in bitmap and TrueType versions for various platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andalé Mono</span> Monospaced typeface

Andalé Mono is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson for terminal emulation and software development environments, originally for the Taligent project by Apple Inc. and IBM. Andalé Mono has a sibling called Andalé Sans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geneva (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface

Geneva is a neo-grotesque or "industrial" sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare for Apple Computer. It is one of the oldest fonts shipped with Macintosh operating systems. The original version was a bitmap font, but later versions were converted to TrueType when that technology became available on the Macintosh platform. Because this Macintosh font is not commonly available on other platforms, many users find Verdana, Microsoft Sans Serif or Arial to be an acceptable substitute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DejaVu fonts</span> Open-source Unicode fonts

The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a free license that allowed derivative works based upon them; the Vera and Charter families were limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode, roughly equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Bitstream's licensing terms allowed the fonts to be expanded upon without explicit authorization. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters ... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors and is organized through a wiki and a mailing list.

Apple's Macintosh computer supports a wide variety of fonts. This support was one of the features that initially distinguished it from other systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Sans Serif</span> Neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface

Microsoft Sans Serif is a sans-serif typeface introduced with early Microsoft Windows versions. It is the successor of MS Sans Serif, formerly Helv, a proportional bitmap font introduced in Windows 1.0. Both typefaces are very similar in design to Arial and Helvetica. The typeface was designed to match the MS Sans bitmap included in the early releases of Microsoft Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Menlo (typeface)</span> Monospaced typeface

Menlo is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Jim Lyles and Charles Bigelow in 1997. The typeface was first shipped with Mac OS X Snow Leopard in August 2009. Menlo superseded Monaco typeface, which had long been the default monospaced typeface on macOS. Menlo is based upon the open source font Bitstream Vera and the public domain font DejaVu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco (sans-serif typeface)</span> Neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface

San Francisco is a neo-grotesque typeface made by Apple Inc. It was first released to developers on November 18, 2014. It is the first new typeface designed at Apple in nearly twenty years and has been inspired by Helvetica and DIN.

References

  1. "BASIC CONVERSIONS".
  2. "Help document for FILE -- MAC Text Editor".
  3. Chris Foresman (2009-06-12). "Font changes coming to Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Updated)". Ars Technica.