A monospaced font, also called a fixed-width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters each occupy the same amount of space. This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another.
The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. This also meant that monospaced fonts need not be typeset like variable width fonts and were, arguably, easier to deal with.
Note that this article generally assumes Western (Latin-based, Cyrillic, or Greek) writing systems. East Asian rules of typography, for example, require CJK fonts to always be monospaced at least as far as the main characters for writing words (i.e. not punctuation) are concerned. Other scripts vary in their use of monospaced fonts.
Contents |
Use in computers
Monospaced fonts were used in early computers, which could only display a single font for the console. Even though computers can now display a wide variety of fonts, almost every commercial IDE and software text editor employs a monospaced font as the default typeface. This increases the readability of source code, since it typically relies more heavily on the distinctions between individual symbols than other text. Monospaced fonts are also used in terminal emulation and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. In technical manuals and resources for programming languages, a monospaced font is often used to distinguish code from plain text.
Use in biology
Monospaced fonts are often used for displaying nucleic acid and protein sequences. This allows each nucleotide or amino acid to take up the same amount of space in a long sequence, and makes it easier to visually align the sequences.
See also
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
