Terminal (typeface)

Last updated
Terminal
Designer(s) Bitstream Inc.
Commissioned by Microsoft
Foundry Microsoft
Date created1984;40 years ago (1984)
The font Terminal at various resolutions Font Terminal Sample.png
The font Terminal at various resolutions

Terminal is a family of monospaced raster typefaces. It is relatively small compared with Courier. It uses crossed zeros, and is designed to approximate the font normally used in MS-DOS or other text-based consoles such as on Linux. In Microsoft Windows, it is used as the default font in the Command Prompt in Windows 7 and earlier.

The Terminal font family contains fonts encoded in various DOS code pages, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fixedsys fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under the DBCS Windows environment, specifying the Terminal font may also cause the application to use non-Terminal fonts when displaying text.

In Windows 2000 or later, changing the script setting in an application's font dialogue (e.g., Notepad, WordPad) causes the Terminal font to look completely different, even under same font size. Similarly, changing the language setting for Windows applications that do not support Unicode will alter the appearance of OEM/DOS scripted Terminal font.

Terminal is based upon code page 437 (or other codepages with suitable language, such as CP850) and is not aligned with Unicode. Most of the characters in Terminal are the same as the characters used in code page 437, but some of the characters (mostly Greek letters and some box-drawing characters) may or may not have been replaced by additional accented letters, depending on the codepage of the system. However, if a font size of 5 pt. is used, the Greek letters and box-drawing characters are still viewable.

According to some strings hidden in the file, the original Terminal font size (9x12) was designed in 1984 by Bitstream Inc., also the DOSAPP.FON which is used by Windows for showing DOS applications in the window is just like Terminal with new sizes added. This typeface was designed in 1991 by Microsoft Corporation. The CGA and EGA versions of the Terminal font exist, but they share similarities with the IBM CGA font, with slight differences in characters but the font is now 40 years old.

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte.

ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin/Arabic. It was designed to cover Arabic. Only nominal letters are encoded, no preshaped forms of the letters, so shaping processing is required for display. It does not include the extra letters needed to write most Arabic-script languages other than Arabic itself.

Arial Unicode MS is a TrueType font and the extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space. It also adds Ideographic layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no smoothing in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique (italic) version. Arial Unicode MS was previously distributed with Microsoft Office, but this ended in 2016 version. It is bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately from Ascender Corporation, who licenses the font from Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fixedsys</span> Sans-serif typeface

Fixedsys is a family of raster monospaced fonts. The name means fixed system, because its glyphs are monospace or fixed-width. It is the oldest font in Microsoft Windows, and was the system font in Windows 1.0 and 2.0, where it was simply named "System". For Windows 3.x, the system font was changed to a proportional sans-serif font named System, but Fixedsys remained the default font in Notepad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Console</span> Infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows

Windows Console is the infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows. An instance of a Windows Console has a screen buffer and an input buffer. It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode. The user can switch between the two using the Alt+↵ Enter key combination. The text mode is unavailable in Windows Vista and later. Starting with Windows 10, however, a native full-screen mode is available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ArmSCII</span> Set of obsolete single-byte character encodings

ArmSCII or ARMSCII is a set of obsolete single-byte character encodings for the Armenian alphabet defined by Armenian national standard 166–9. ArmSCII is an acronym for Armenian Standard Code for Information Interchange, similar to ASCII for the American standard. It has been superseded by the Unicode standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code page 850</span> Computer character set for Latin scripts

Code page 850 is a code page used under DOS operating systems in Western Europe. Depending on the country setting and system configuration, code page 850 is the primary code page and default OEM code page in many countries, including various English-speaking locales, whilst other English-speaking locales default to the hardware code page 437.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code page 437</span> Character set of the original IBM PC

Code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC. It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacritics), Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the "OEM font" or "high ASCII", or as "extended ASCII".

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

There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.

The Kamenický encoding, named for the brothers Jiří and Marian Kamenický, was a code page for personal computers running DOS, very popular in Czechoslovakia around 1985–1995. Another name for this encoding is KEYBCS2, the name of the terminate-and-stay-resident utility which implemented the matching keyboard driver. It was also named KAMENICKY.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code page 866</span> Computer character set for Russian

Code page 866 is a code page used under DOS and OS/2 in Russia to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative code page" developed in 1984 in IHNA AS USSR and published in 1986 by a research group at the Academy of Science of the USSR. The code page was widely used during the DOS era because it preserves all of the pseudographic symbols of code page 437 and maintains alphabetic order of Cyrillic letters. Initially this encoding was only available in the Russian version of MS-DOS 4.01 (1990), but with MS-DOS 6.22 it became available in any language version.

Code page 852 is a code page used under DOS to write Central European languages that use Latin script.

Several 8-bit character sets (encodings) were designed for binary representation of common Western European languages, which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols. These character sets also happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.

Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages used in Microsoft Windows from the 1980s and 1990s. Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Windows, although they are still supported both within Windows and other platforms, and still apply when Alt code shortcuts are used.

System is a family of proportional raster fonts distributed with Microsoft Windows. Sharing the same letterforms as Microsoft Sans Serif which in turn is modeled after Helvetica, the font family contains fonts encoded in several Windows code pages, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under double-byte character set Windows environments, specifying this font may also cause applications to use non-System fonts when displaying texts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extended ASCII</span> Nickname for 8-bit ASCII-derived character sets

Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) had updated its ANSI X3.4-1986 standard to include more characters, or that the term identifies a single unambiguous encoding, neither of which is the case.

In computing, a hardware code page (HWCP) refers to a code page supported natively by a hardware device such as a display adapter or printer. The glyphs to present the characters are stored in the alphanumeric character generator's resident read-only memory and are thus not user-changeable. They are available for use by the system without having to load any font definitions into the device first. Startup messages issued by a PC's System BIOS or displayed by an operating system before initializing its own code page switching logic and font management and before switching to graphics mode are displayed in a computer's default hardware code page.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atari ST character set</span> Character set of the Atari ST personal computer family

The Atari ST character set is the character set of the Atari ST personal computer family including the Atari STE, TT and Falcon. It is based on code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC.

The GEM character set is the character set of Digital Research's graphical user interface GEM on Intel platforms. It is based on code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC.