Consolas

Consolas

Category	Monospaced
Designer(s)	Lucas de Groot
Foundry	Microsoft
Sample

Consolas is a monospaced (non-proportional) typeface, designed by Lucas de Groot. It is a part of a new suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It comes with Microsoft's Windows Vista, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and is available for download from Microsoft. Among the Windows Vista fonts, Consolas is most similar to the original Windows 3.1 monospaced font Courier New or Lucida Console and Monaco from Mac OS X. It is the only standard 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 has 713 glyphs was initially available, as compared to Courier New (2.90)'s 1318 glyphs. In version 5.22 (included with the Windows 7), support for Thai, Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks For Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Box Drawing, Geometric Shapes, Arabic (roman fonts only) were added.

Sample

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

The following is a sample Visual C++ program using 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 with simple rasterization only and no anti-aliasing. If used as such, 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, Constantia and Corbel, is also distributed with the free Powerpoint 2007 Viewer^[2] and the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.^[3]

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.

Raph Levien cites Consolas as an inspiration for Inconsolata, a monospaced font of his creation.^[4] Inconsolata is released under the SIL Open Font License and is available as a package for Debian, Ubuntu and other Linux distros.^[5]

References

1. ^ Consolas and ClearType, Jeff Atwood
2. ^ Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Viewer
3. ^ Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack
4. ^ Inconsolata
5. ^ Package ttf-inconsolata. Debian.net.

External links

• Microsoft Typography page
• Van Wagener, Anne (2005-03-04). "The Next Big Thing in Online Type". The Design Desk. Poynter Online. http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683. Retrieved 2006-06-05. 
• "Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005". Microsoft. 2006-05-03. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3. Retrieved 2007-09-02. 
• Microsoft ClearType Font Collection at Microsoft Typography
• Download Consolas Font from Microsoft Downloads

Notes