Charcoal is a sans-serif

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 o ...

Font Bureau The Font Bureau, Inc. or Font Bureau is a digital type foundry based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The foundry is one of the leading designers of typefaces, specializing in type designs for magazine and newspaper publishers. History ...

during the period 1994–1997. Charcoal was the default menu font in Apple Computer's

Mac OS 8 Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis o ...

and 9, replacing the relatively harder-to-read

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

as part of the new Platinum interface. In

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

developer preview 3, it was replaced with

Lucida Grande Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as ...

as the system typeface. Charcoal is designed for high legibility, even at smaller point sizes, displayed on computer monitors. While similar in design to grotesque sans-serifs, Charcoal has a distinctive organic quality. The letterforms have a high

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...

, a vertical axis, and maintain generous counter-form in and around the letterforms. Descending characters, g, j, p, q, and y are shallow, compensating for the high x-height, and allowing for reduced leading in text. While designed primarily for monitor display, Charcoal has had considerable popularity in print, including in letterpress printing.
Virtue
is a free

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

font of similar design sometimes used as a surrogate on non-Apple systems.

Truth

''Truth'', an expanded Charcoal family, is sold by Font Bureau, designed by David Berlow, and was released in 2005. It contains small differences from Charcoal, and is available in seven weights: Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black, and Ultra.

References

External links

New Fonts: FB Truth and MinahTruth FB TruthOnline showing and comparisons
Font Bureau typefaces Sans-serif typefaces Apple Inc. typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1995 Typefaces designed by David Berlow {{Typ-stub