System is a family of proportional

raster 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 print ...

s distributed with

Microsoft 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 serv ...

. Sharing the same letterforms as

Microsoft Sans Serif Microsoft Sans Serif is a TrueType font introduced with early Windows versions. It is the successor of MS Sans Serif (formerly Helv), a proportional bitmap font introduced in Windows 1.0. Both fonts are very similar in design to Arial and Helvet ...

, the font family contains fonts encoded in several Windows

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...

s, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under

DBCS A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character encoding in which either all characters (including control characters) are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying single-byte character set ( ...

Windows environment, specifying this font may also cause applications to use non-System fonts when displaying texts. In

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...

or later, changing script setting in some application's font dialogue (e.g.:

Notepad A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often Ruled paper, ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, diary, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbook ...

WordPad WordPad is the basic word processor that has been included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Windows Notepad, and simpler than Microsoft Word and Microsoft Works (last updated in 2007) ...

) causes the font to look completely different, even under same font size. Similarly, changing language setting for Windows applications that do not support Unicode will alter the appearance of the font. When Windows is running with low system resources, System is the fallback font used for displaying texts. Also, a string hidden in the .FON file (viewable with a

hex editor A hex editor (or ''binary file editor'' or ''byte editor'') is a computer program that allows for manipulation of the fundamental binary data that constitutes a computer file. The name 'hex' comes from ' hexadecimal', a standard numerical format f ...

or with a typeface editor such as Fony), reveals that this font was designed by Microsoft Corporation in 1988–1989, according to the copyright string hidden in the font file. Also, CGA, EGA and 8514/a versions of this font existed, also designed in the same period (1988-1989) by Microsoft Corporation. Also the 8514 variant remained in use on modern Windows versions as a high-DPI version of it.

Example

The following is an example of the System typeface. :

Example

See also