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 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 ...

. Sharing the same letterforms as

Microsoft Sans Serif Microsoft Sans Serif is a sans-serif typeface introduced with early Microsoft Windows versions. It is the successor of MS Sans Serif, formerly Helv, a proportional bitmap font introduced in Windows 1.0. Both typefaces are very similar in design ...

which in turn is modeled after

Helvetica Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely-used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the f ...

, 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 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. Fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under

double-byte character set 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 environments, 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, 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 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 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 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. The copyright message in the .FON file says the font was designed by Microsoft Corporation in 1988–1989. Microsoft also created CGA, EGA and 8514/A versions of the font. The 8514 variant remained in use on modern Windows Versions such as Windows 10 and 11 versions as a high-DPI version. System example

References

Sans-serif typefaces Microsoft typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1992 {{typ-stub

See also

References