Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif

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, ...

that

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is an English type designer.A Man of Letters

designed for

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. Microsoft first distributed it, along with Carter's Verdana, as a

computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printi ...

with Office 97. While similar to Verdana, Tahoma has a narrower body, smaller counters, much tighter letter spacing, and a more complete

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

character set. Carter first designed Tahoma as a bitmap font, then "carefully wrapped"

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

outlines around those bitmaps. Carter based the bold weight on a double pixel width, rendering it closer to a heavy or black weight. In contrast with some other sans-serif typefaces, including

Arial Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the Sans-serif#Neo-grotesque, 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 ma ...

, the uppercase "I" (eye) is distinguishable from lowercase "l" (ell), which is especially important in technical publications. Since 2010, Ascender Corporation has offered italic and

small caps In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. Small caps are used i ...

versions of Tahoma. In an interview by Daniel Will-Harris, Carter acknowledged that Tahoma has some similarities with his earlier Bell Centennial typeface. The Tahoma typeface family was named after the Native American name for the

stratovolcano A stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, is a typically conical volcano built up by many alternating layers (strata) of hardened lava and tephra. Unlike shield volcanoes, stratovolcanoes are characterized by a steep profile with ...

Mount Rainier Mount Rainier ( ), also known as Tahoma, is a large active stratovolcano in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest in the United States. The mountain is located in Mount Rainier National Park about south-southeast of Seattle. With an off ...

(Mount Tahoma), which is a prominent feature of the southern landscape around the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

metropolitan area.

Bundling

Tahoma was an official font supplied with Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP, and was freely distributed with Word Viewer 97. Tahoma was the default screen font used by

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, and

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...

(replacing MS Sans Serif) and was also used for

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

and

Sega is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...

Dreamcast The is the final home video game console manufactured by Sega. It was released in Japan on November 27, 1998, in North America on September 9, 1999 and in Europe on October 14, 1999. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, prec ...

packaging and promotional material. Bundled in the font library of Windows, the typeface was widely used as an alternative to

. Tahoma was also the default screen font of

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 ...

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

Windows 7 Windows 7 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 July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

and

Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2, codenamed "Windows Server 7" or "Windows Server 2008 Release 2", is the eighth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It was release ...

when used Windows Classic theme. In 2007,

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

announced that Tahoma would be bundled with the next version of Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"). Leopard also shipped with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif,

Arial Unicode 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 ...

, and

Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat typeface, fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida (font), Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bige ...

. As of 2016, Tahoma is still widely in use as a standard in multiple applications and programming environments. For example, a new

Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...

VCL application uses Tahoma as its default font.

Free replacement

The

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

project includes the

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

fonts ''Wine Tahoma Regular'' and ''Wine Tahoma Bold'' released under

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

designed to have identical

metrics Metric or metrical may refer to: Measuring * Metric system, an internationally adopted decimal system of measurement * An adjective indicating relation to measurement in general, or a noun describing a specific type of measurement Mathematics ...

to the Tahoma font.As of Wine version 0.9.4
Version 0.9.47 release announcement
''WineHQ.org'', retrieved May 22, 2009. This was done because Tahoma is available by default on Windows, and many applications expect the font to be available. Before Wine included a Tahoma replacement font, some applications, such as

Steam Steam is water vapor, often mixed with air or an aerosol of liquid water droplets. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization. Saturated or superheated steam is inv ...

, would not display any text at all, rendering them nearly unusable.

References

External links

Microsoft typography information on Tahoma
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tahoma (Typeface) Humanist sans-serif typefaces Microsoft typefaces Windows XP typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1994 Typefaces designed by Matthew Carter IPA typefaces Arabic typefaces Cyrillic typefaces Greek typefaces Latin-script typefaces Thai typefaces Hebrew typefaces