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Trebuchet MS is a
humanist sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
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 list of type ...
that
Vincent Connare Vincent Connare (born September 26, 1960) is an American type designer and former Microsoft employee. Among his creations are the fonts Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS, as well as the Man in Business Suit Levitating emoji. Besides text typefaces, ...
designed for
Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
in 1996. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme, succeeding
MS 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 ...
and Tahoma. Released free of charge by Microsoft as part of their
core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
package, it remained one of the most popular body text fonts on webpages as of 2009.


Etymology

Trebuchet MS is named after the
trebuchet A trebuchet (french: trébuchet) is a type of catapult that uses a long arm to throw a projectile. It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder. The design of a trebuchet allows it to launch projectiles of greater weigh ...
, a medieval
siege engine A siege engine is a device that is designed to break or circumvent heavy castle doors, thick city walls and other fortifications in siege warfare. Some are immobile, constructed in place to attack enemy fortifications from a distance, while other ...
. The name was inspired by a puzzle question that Connare heard at Microsoft headquarters: "Can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically, is it possible and how?" Connare "thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet".


Distinguishing characteristics

Connare said in 2011 that "inspiration came from many sources such as the motorway signage in America and sans serif typefaces like
Akzidenz Grotesk Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. ''german: label=none, italic=no, "Akzidenz"'' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tick ...
and
Alternate Gothic Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head des ...
." Writing on Typophile in 2005 and also in his 1997 article on Trebuchet, he also noted that a goal was to provide a typeface that worked well onscreen while providing a contrast in texture to
Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography ...
. Features of Trebuchet include: * The splayed edges of the uppercase "M" which form a 10° angle with a vertical line, reminiscent of a tighter version of Futura. * The shape of the tail of the uppercase "Q". * The bar of the capital "A" is low. * The shortened tails of the lowercase "e" and the numerals "6" and "9". * The hybrid open and looped tail of the lowercase "g". * The rounded dots above and the shapes of the lowercase "i" and "j". * The curved tail beneath the lowercase "l". * The dollar sign symbol "$", in which the vertical strike only appears above the top and below the bottom curves of the S. * The
ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters ''et''—Latin for "and". Etymology Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter that ...
"&" in the form of an "Et"
ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
. * The exclamation point "!", whose dot is large and round. * Italic fonts incorporate
italic type In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed tex ...
characteristics instead of just tilting roman glyphs, making it the first sans serif font family from Microsoft to use true italic features. * The bold version also has some distinctive features: pointed rather than square-cut tails on lowercase "a" and "l", and slant-cut rather than square-cut ascenders. * The
en dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen b ...
and
hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. ''Son-in-law'' is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (figure d ...
are essentially indistinguishable. * The Greek letter xi "Ξ" has a vertical crossbar, reminiscent of its Phoenician root glyph
samekh Samekh (Phoenician ''sāmek'' ; Hebrew ''samekh'' , Syriac ''semkaṯ'') is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including the Hebrew alphabet. Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative . Unlike most Semitic consonants, the pro ...
.


Availability

Microsoft refers to Trebuchet MS as "a good
web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code an ...
font", being one of their "
Core fonts for the Web Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
". Trebuchet MS is included with several products, including the
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 ...
operating system, components of the
Office An office is a space where an Organization, organization's employees perform Business administration, administrative Work (human activity), work in order to support and realize objects and Goals, plans, action theory, goals of the organizati ...
productivity suite, and
Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
. In some versions of the font (those shipped with
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 ...
and early versions of Internet Explorer), the opening quotation mark character was flipped vertically like so: . This error was fixed in later versions. Trebuchet MS has been released with the Microsoft Windows operating system since Microsoft Windows 2000. The typeface has been released with Internet Explorer since version 4.0 and
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
since Word 2000. It is also included with
macOS 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 lapt ...
,
iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
and
ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...
. The Trebuchet 2010 font family was introduced by Ascender Corp in July 2010 as part of the Ascender 2010 Font Pack. In addition to extensive
OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...
typographic feature support, the family was extended with new black and black italic fonts. The new weights and OpenType features were developed by Ascender’s
Steve Matteson Steven R. Matteson (born 1965, Chicago, Illinois) is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Micr ...
and Terrance Weinzierl.


Trebuchet Pro

In 2010, Ascender and Microsoft released an expanded version of Trebuchet for commercial sale. This included additional features such as small caps,
stylistic alternates In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mode ...
and
text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
, as well as an additional Black weight with italic.


References


External links


The Microsoft typography website

Trebuchet MS font information
(Microsoft typography)

a short article describing the evolution of Trebuchet MS (Microsoft typography)
Comments by Connare on Typophile thread
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trebuchet Ms Humanist sans-serif typefaces Microsoft typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1996 Windows XP typefaces Typefaces designed by Vincent Connare