Terminal (typeface)

For other uses, see Terminal (disambiguation).

The font Terminal at various resolutions

Terminal is a family of monospaced raster typefaces. It is relatively small compared to Courier. It uses crossed zeros, and is designed to approximate the font normally used in MS-DOS or other text-based consoles such as on Linux. In Microsoft Windows, it is used as the default font in the Command Prompt.

Terminal font family contains fonts encoded in various DOS code pages, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fixedsys fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under DBCS Windows environment, specifying Terminal font may also cause application to use non-Terminal fonts when displaying texts.

In Windows 2000 or later, changing script setting in some application's font dialogue (e.g., Notepad, WordPad) causes Terminal font to look completely different, even under same font size. Similarly, changing language setting for Windows applications that do not support Unicode will alter the appearance of OEM/DOS scripted Terminal font.

Terminal is also the font that most text pads from ASCII art should be viewed as, because Terminal is often a visual font.

Terminal is based upon code page 437 and is not aligned with Unicode. Most of the characters in Terminal are the same as the characters used in code page 437, but some of the characters (most Greek letters and some box drawing characters) have been replaced by additional accented letters. However, if a font size of 5 pt. is used, the Greek letters and box drawing characters are still viewable.

See also

• Consolas
• Fixedsys