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 Typeface#Proportion, variable-width fonts, where t ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

Luc(as) de Groot Lucas de Groot (; born ), 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 large typeface family Thesis (a ...

. It is a part of the ClearType Font Collection, 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 addit ...

font rendering technology. It has been included with

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

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 Novemb ...

and

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by 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. It was first released in 1983 to commercialize the computer mouse in MS-DOS. History In May 1983, at the COMDEX computer expo in Atlanta, Microsof ...

starting with

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

Characteristics

Consolas supports the following

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

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, wh ...

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, wh ...

. Although Consolas is designed as a replacement for

Courier New Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface commissioned by IBM and designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999) in the mid-1950s. The Courier name and typeface concept are in the public domain. Courier has been adapted for use as a computer f ...

, 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 ...

s were initially available, as compared to Courier New (2.90)'s 1,318 glyphs. In version 5.22, 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 2,735. In version 7.00 there are 3,030 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 2006, with Windows Vista. In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Time ...

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) or the early medieval period. After the ...

Candara Candara is a Sans-serif#Classification, 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 star ...

Corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal keyed into and projecting from a wall to carry a wikt:superincumbent, bearing weight, a type of bracket (architecture), bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in t ...

and Constantia, is also distributed with Microsoft

Excel Viewer Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a ...

, Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, the

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

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 in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and people previously involved in dev ...

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

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

Alternatives

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

, 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-software license, free and open source font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and Applica ...

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