Consolas is a monospaced (non-proportional) typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

, designed by Lucas de Groot. It is a part of a new suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType

ClearType

ClearType is a trademark for Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additional intensity variation. This trade-off is asserted to work well on...

 font rendering technology. It comes with Microsoft's

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 is a Windows version of the Microsoft Office System, Microsoft's productivity suite. Formerly known as Office 12 in the initial stages of its beta cycle, it was released to volume license customers on November 30, 2006 and made available to retail customers on January 30, 2007...

 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and is available for download from Microsoft. Among the Windows Vista fonts, Consolas is most similar to the original Windows 3.1 monospaced font Courier New or Lucida Console and Monaco

Monaco (typeface)

Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. The face shipped with all versions of Mac OS X and was already present with previous versions of the Mac operating system...

 from Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. It is the only standard Vista font with a slash through the zero character

Slashed zero

The slashed zero is a representation of the number '0' , with a slash through it. In character encoding terms, it is an alternate glyph for the self-same zero character...

.

Characteristics

Consolas is a departure in the realm of Windows programming fonts because it is designed to work with a specific form of font antialiasing, specifically Microsoft's ClearType technology. The font hinting is correspondingly ClearType-specific, and as a result the font is highly aliased

Aliasing

In signal processing and related disciplines, aliasing refers to an effect that causes different signals to become indistinguishable when sampled...

 when used with ClearType switched off.

Consolas supports the following OpenType

OpenType

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...

 layout features: stylistic alternates, localized forms, uppercase-sensitive forms, oldstyle figures

Text figures

Text figures are numerals typeset with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the name...

, lining figures, arbitrary fractions, superscript, subscript.

Although Consolas is designed as a replacement for Courier New, only 713 glyphs were initially available, as compared to Courier New (2.90)'s 1318 glyphs. In version 5.22 (included with the Windows 7), support for Thai, Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks For Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Box Drawing, Geometric Shapes, Arabic (roman fonts only) were added.

Sample

Note that the images below will look different depending on if you have a CRT monitor or a LCD display. LCD displays can also produce different visuals depending on their subpixel

Subpixel rendering

Subpixel rendering is a way to increase the apparent resolution of a computer's liquid crystal display or Organic Light Emitting Diode display by rendering pixels to take into account the screen type's physical properties...

-layout.

The following is a sample Visual C++

Visual C++

Microsoft Visual C++ is a commercial , integrated development environment product from Microsoft for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages...

 program using Consolas, with ClearType enabled:

For comparison, the same program using the traditional Windows programming font, Courier New, without ClearType:

As noted above: unlike Courier New, Consolas is not designed to be used with simple rasterization

Font rasterization

Font rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description to a raster or bitmap description. This often involves some anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read...

 only and no anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing

In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution...

. If used as such, the result is highly aliased

Aliasing

In signal processing and related disciplines, aliasing refers to an effect that causes different signals to become indistinguishable when sampled...

 at many sizes.

However, even on systems that do not support ClearType (such as those running older versions of Windows), using simple grayscale anti-aliasing alleviates this (to a degree).

Availability

This font, along with Calibri

Calibri

Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface family under the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection.In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad...

, Cambria

Cambria (typeface)

Cambria is part of the suite of fonts that comes with Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, specifically designed for on-screen reading and to be aesthetically pleasing when printed at small sizes. It is a...

, Candara

Candara

Candara is a humanist sans-serif typeface, which is bundled with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7. Candara’s verticals show both entasis and ekstasis on opposite sides of stems, high-branching arcades in the lowercase, large apertures in all open forms, and unique ogee curves on diagonals.The...

, Constantia

Constantia (typeface)

Constantia is part of the suite of typefaces that come with Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007. The development began in 2003....

 and Corbel

Corbel (typeface)

Corbel is a sans-serif typeface designed by Jeremy Tankard for Microsoft and released in 2005. It is a part of the new suite of fonts that come with Microsoft Windows Vista developed to take advantage of ClearType to improve the reading experience in Windows Vista and Office 2007.Corbel is designed...

, is also distributed with the free Powerpoint 2007 Viewer and the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

Consolas is also available for licensing from Ascender Corporation

Ascender Corporation

Ascender Corporation is a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States...

.

Bare Bones Software has licensed the font from Ascender for use in their Mac OS X text editor BBEdit

BBEdit

BBEdit is a proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software. It was originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6 and is now available for Mac OS X.BBEdit is marketed under the trademark slogan, "It doesn't suck."-History:...

.

Raph Levien

Raph Levien

Raphael Levien is an influential member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. He is currently employed by Google...

 cites Consolas as an inspiration for Inconsolata

Inconsolata

Inconsolata is an open source font created by Raph Levien and released under the SIL Open Font License. It is a monospaced font designed for source code listing, terminal emulators, and similar uses. Its design was largely inspired by humanist designs...

, a monospaced font of his creation. Inconsolata is released under the SIL Open Font License

SIL Open Font License

The SIL Open Font License is a free and open source license designed for fonts by SIL International for use with some of their Unicode fonts. The license is considered free by the Free Software Foundation, which states that a simple hello world program is enough to satisfy the license's requirement...

and is available as a package for Debian, Ubuntu and other Linux distros.

External links

• Microsoft Typography page
• Microsoft ClearType Font Collection at Microsoft Typography
• Download Consolas Font from Microsoft Downloads