Monaco (typeface)

Monaco

Category	Sans-serif
Classification	Monospace
Designer(s)	Susan Kare
Foundry	Apple Inc.

Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. The face shipped with all versions of OS X and was already present with previous versions of the Mac operating system. Characters are distinct, and it is difficult to confuse 0 (figure zero) and O (uppercase O), or 1 (figure one) | (Vertical bar) I (uppercase i) and l (lowercase l).

Monaco has been released in at least three forms. The original was a bitmap monospace font that still appears in the ROMs of even New World Macs, and is still the default form in 9 point size even on OS X. The second is the outline form, loosely similar to Lucida Console and created as a TrueType font for System 6 and 7; this is the standard. There was briefly a third known as MPW, since it was designed to be used with the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop IDE; it was essentially a straight conversion of the bitmap font into an outline font with the addition of some of the same disambiguation features as were added to the TrueType Monaco.

With the August 2009 release of OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard", Menlo was introduced as the default monospaced font instead of Monaco in Terminal and Xcode, However, Monaco remains a part of OS X.

See also

• Apple typography

External links

• n8f8 (Dec 08, 2004-12-08). "Finding the Best Programmer's Font". 

• Susan Kare (August 1983). "Macintosh Stories: World Class Cities". folklore.org.