Terminal is a family of

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 ...

raster typefaces. It is relatively small compared with

Courier A courier is a person or organization that delivers a message, package or letter from one place or person to another place or person. Typically, a courier provides their courier service on a commercial contract basis; however, some couriers are ...

. It uses crossed zeros, and is designed to approximate the font normally used in

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

or other text-based consoles such as on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. In

Microsoft 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 ...

, it is used as the default font in the

Command Prompt A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

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 earlier. The Terminal font family contains fonts encoded in various DOS

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

s, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page.

Fixedsys ''Fixedsys'' is a family of Bitmap font, raster monospaced fonts. The name means ''fixed system'', because its glyphs are monospace or fixed-width (although bolded characters are wider than non-bolded, unlike other monospace fonts such as Courier ...

fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under the DBCS Windows environment, specifying the Terminal font may also cause the application to use non-Terminal fonts when displaying text. In

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 ...

or later, changing the script setting in an 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 scrapbooki ...

WordPad WordPad is a word processor software designed by Microsoft that was included in versions of Windows from Windows 95 through Windows 11, version 23H2. Similarly to its predecessor Microsoft Write, it served as a basic word processor, positione ...

) causes the Terminal font to look completely different, even under same font size. Similarly, changing the language setting for Windows applications that do not support Unicode will alter the appearance of OEM/DOS scripted Terminal font. Terminal is based upon

code page 437 Code page 437 ( CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or MS-DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (di ...

(or other codepages with suitable language, such as CP850) and is not aligned with

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 ...

. Most of the characters in Terminal are the same as the characters used in code page 437, but some of the characters (mostly

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

letters and some

box-drawing character Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. These characters are characterized by being designed to be connected horiz ...

s) may or may not have been replaced by additional accented letters, depending on the codepage of the system. However, if a font size of 5 pt. is used, the Greek letters and box-drawing characters are still viewable. According to some strings hidden in the file, the original Terminal font size (9x12) was designed in 1984 by

Bitstream Inc Bitstream Inc. was an American type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter, Mike Parker, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, all former employees of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. It was located in Ma ...

. The DOSAPP.FON which is used by Windows for showing DOS applications in the window is the same as Terminal, but with new sizes added. This typeface was designed in 1991 by

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 ...

. The CGA and EGA versions of the Terminal font exist, but they share similarities with the

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

CGA font, with slight differences in characters.

References

External links

* Microsoft typefaces Monospaced typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1985 Raster typefaces {{Typ-stub

See also

References

External links