- Tahoma (typeface)
Infobox font
name = Tahoma
style =Sans-serif
date =1994
creator =Matthew Carter
foundry = Carter & Cone|Tahoma is a humanist
sans-serif typeface designed byMatthew Carter for theMicrosoft Corporation in 1994 with initial distribution along withVerdana forWindows 95 .Tahoma is very similar to
Verdana but with a narrower body, less generous counters, tighter letterspacing, and a more completeUnicode character set. Designed from the start as a bitmap rather than outlines, the bold weight is heavy. Being based upon a double pixel width the bold weight is more similar to a heavy or black weight.Though often compared with the humanist sans-serif typeface
Frutiger , in an interview with Daniel Will-Harris, Matthew Carter acknowledges some similarities with his earlier typefaceBell Centennial . [ Daniel Will-Harris. [http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm "Georgia & Verdana: Typefaces designed for the screen (finally)'"] "TypoFiles," retrieved January 16, 2007.]It is also the default screen font used by
Windows 2000 ,Windows XP , andWindows Server 2003 (replacingMS Sans Serif ) and is also used forSega 's Dreamcast. Bundled for inclusion in the font library of Windows, the typeface is widely used as an alternative toArial .The Tahoma typeface family was named after the Native American name for the stratovolcano
Mount Rainier (Mount Tahoma) which is a prominent feature of the southern landscape around the Seattle metropolitan area.Bundling on non-Microsoft operating systems
On
October 16 ,2007 , Apple announced on their website that Tahoma would be bundled with the next version of their flagship operating system,Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"). Leopard also shipped with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, includingMicrosoft Sans Serif ,Arial Unicode , andWingdings .References
External links
* [http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=19 Microsoft typography information on Tahoma]
* [http://download.microsoft.com/download/office97pro/fonts/1/w95/en-us/tahoma32.exe Direct Download on Microsoft website]
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