Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif

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 thousands o ...

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 technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

in 1996. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme, succeeding MS Sans Serif 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 weight ...

, 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 oth ...

. 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, tic ...

and Alternate Gothic." 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 typograph ...

. 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 tha ...

"&" in the form of an "Et" ligature. * 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 ...

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 ...

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 p ...

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 a ...

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 se ...

operating system, components of the

Office An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific ...

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 web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems (in ...

. 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 released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was offici ...

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 processor, 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 pla ...

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 la ...

, iOS 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 interfa ...

. 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 ...

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 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