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. 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 pages, 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 released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officiall ...

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 and used for purposes such as note-taking, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbooking. History ...

, WordPad) 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