Consolas is a

monospaced A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

Luc(as) de Groot Lucas de Groot (born in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands), known professionally as Luc(as) de Groot, is a Dutch type designer. He is the head of the type foundry Fontfabrik, also trading as LucasFonts. De Groot is particularly known for the very ...

. It is a part of the

ClearType Font Collection ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additi ...

, a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's

ClearType ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additi ...

font rendering technology. It has been included with

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

since

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Nove ...

and

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms ...

, and is available for download from Microsoft. It is the only standard Windows Vista font with a slash through the zero character. It is the default font for

Microsoft Notepad Windows Notepad is a simple text editor for Windows; it creates and edits plain text documents. First released in 1983 to commercialize the computer mouse in MS-DOS, Notepad has been part of every version of Windows ever since. History In May ...

as of

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

Characteristics

Consolas supports the following

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. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

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

superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...

subscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...

. Although Consolas is designed as a replacement for

Courier New Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface. The typeface was designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999). Initially created for IBM's typewriters, it has been adapted for use as a computer font, and versions of it are installed on most desk ...

, only 713

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s were initially available, as compared to Courier New (2.90)'s 1318 glyphs. In version 5.22 (included with Windows 7), support for Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks For Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Box Drawing, and Geometric Shapes was added. In version 5.32 the total number of supported glyphs was 2735. In version 7.00 (as part of Windows 10 1909) there are 3030 glyphs in total.

Availability

This font, along with

Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2007, with Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista. In Office 2007, ...

Cambria Cambria is a name for Wales, being the Latinised form of the Welsh name for the country, . The term was not in use during the Roman period (when Wales had not come into existence as a distinct entity). It emerged later, in the medieval period, ...

Candara Candara is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Gary Munch and commissioned by Microsoft. It is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with Windows Vista, all starting with the letter ''C' ...

, Corbel and Constantia, is also distributed with Microsoft

Excel Viewer Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applic ...

Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...

, the

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. Consolas is also available for licensing from

Ascender Corporation Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font ...

. Bare Bones Software has licensed the font from Ascender for use in their text editor

BBEdit BBEdit is a proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software, originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6, and currently supporting macOS. History The first version of BBEdit was created as a "bare bones" text editor to serve as a "p ...

Alternatives

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

, an open source font inspired by Consolas, is available on

Google Fonts Google Fonts (formerly known as Google Web Fonts) is a computer font and web font service owned by Google. This includes free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for using the fonts via ...

References

External links

Microsoft Typography page
* {{Microsoft Windows Typefaces Monospaced typefaces Windows Vista typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2006 Typefaces designed by Luc(as) de Groot ClearType Font Collection IPA typefaces

Characteristics

Availability

Alternatives

See also

References

External links