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Consolas

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Consolas
CategoryMonospaced
Designer(s)Luc(as) de Groot
FoundryMicrosoft
LicenseProprietary
Consolas sample text
Sample

Consolas is a monospaced (non-proportional) typeface, designed by Luc(as) de Groot. It is a part of a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It is included with Windows since Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and is available for download from Microsoft. It is the only standard Windows Vista font with a slash through the zero character.

Characteristics

Consolas is a departure in the realm of Windows programming fonts because it is designed to work with a specific form of font antialiasing, specifically Microsoft's ClearType technology. The font hinting is correspondingly ClearType-specific, and as a result the font is highly aliased when used with ClearType switched off.[1]

Consolas supports the following OpenType layout features: stylistic alternates, localized forms, uppercase-sensitive forms, oldstyle figures, lining figures, arbitrary fractions, superscript, subscript.

Although Consolas is designed as a replacement for Courier New, only 713 glyphs were initially available, as compared to Courier New (2.90)'s 1318 glyphs. In version 5.22 (included with Windows 7), support for Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks For Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Box Drawing, Geometric Shapes was added.

Sample

Note that the images below will look different depending on whether you have a CRT monitor or an LCD. LCDs can also produce different visuals depending on their subpixel-layout.

The following is a sample Visual C++ source code displayed in Consolas, with ClearType enabled:

For comparison, the same program using the traditional Windows programming font, Courier New, without ClearType:

As noted above: unlike Courier New, Consolas is not designed to be used in environments that only support simple rasterization and/or don't support anti-aliasing. If Consolas is used in such scenarios, the result is highly aliased at many sizes.

However, even on systems that do not support ClearType (such as those running older versions of Windows), using simple grayscale anti-aliasing alleviates this (to a degree).

Availability

This font, along with Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Corbel and Constantia, is also distributed with various free Office viewers,[2][3][4] the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack[5] and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac.[6]

Consolas is also available for licensing from Ascender Corporation.

Bare Bones Software has licensed the font from Ascender for use in their Mac OS X text editor BBEdit.

See also

Inconsolata

References

  1. ^ Consolas and ClearType, Jeff Atwood
  2. ^ Word Viewer
  3. ^ Excel Viewer
  4. ^ Powerpoint Viewer
  5. ^ Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats
  6. ^ Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.2.1
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Consolas.
  • Microsoft Typography page
  • Van Wagener, Anne (2005-03-04). "The Next Big Thing in Online Type". The Design Desk. Poynter Online. Retrieved 2006-06-05.
  • "Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005". Microsoft. 2006-05-03. Retrieved 2007-09-02.
  • Microsoft ClearType Font Collection at Microsoft Typography
  • Download Consolas Font from Microsoft Downloads
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