This is a guide covering everything you need to know about monospaced fonts.
Let’s dive in!
What is a Monospaced Font?
A monospaced font is a font in which all the individual characters or letters of a word have the same spacing horizontally. In other words, each letter takes the same amount of space when we type them, which focuses on the individual letters instead of the whole word.
Primarily, fonts can be divided into two parts, proportional and monospaced. Both have different uses in the industry.
When used correctly, monospaced fonts work well and enhance the beauty or add character to your headings, ads, social media posts, etc.
When we say horizontal spacing, we are talking about the width of the characters. In monospaced fonts, the width stays the same for all the characters and letters.
Since the width is the same, the letters in monospaced fonts look farther apart than in proportional fonts, and they seem to have more spacing.
A monospaced font is different from a proportional font because, in a proportional font, all the letters occupy the minimum space horizontally.
So, for example, we have ‘Word is awesome’ in Courier New and ‘Word is awesome’ in Times New Roman, a Proportional font. The difference is obvious here.
Monospaced Font Examples
The monospaced font family has several different monospaced fonts that you can use when you need a simple typeface.
You can use it when you want each character to be seen separately, like in numbers. Monospaced fonts also have Serif, San Serif, and Slab Serif monospaced typefaces.
1. Courier
Courier is the most common monospaced font out there.
It closely resembles the style that typewriters used, but it can pose legibility problems on screen if used in long paragraphs or long bodies of text.
Courier has many versions such as Courier New, Courier Prime, etc.
2. Bergen Mono
Bergen Mono is a monospace font that is popular due to its legibility.
It works great for both online and print media.
3. Anonymous Pro
Anonymous Pro is attributed to Mark Simonson, and it’s unique to Monospaced fonts because it has italic, normal, bold, and even bold italic font styles.
It works great with online media, especially for coding – computer programming.
4. Alma Mono
The ends of every letter are rounded in Alma Mono, which gives a friendly vibe to the overall text.
They work well for online media, and it will give your content a fun vibe, and it packs character (not the ASCII one!).
5. Apercu Mono
Apercu Mono is suited to digital media, and it’s a font that shows that not all monospaced fonts need to look the same.
It gives off a good quirky or eccentric feel when used.
6. Inconsolata
Inconsolata is a monospaced font that appears clear and crisp on-screen.
As a result, it’s typically used by programmers. Raph Levien is the one who designed this clear font.
7. GT Pressure Mono
GT Pressure Mono is an example of San Serifs monospaced font, this font has three versions, regular, light, and bold.
Plus, it has italics for all three versions.
8. Pitch
Pitch is a Slab Serif font created by Kris Sowersby.
It’s mid-way between typewritten text and Slab Serif, and it closely resembles Clarendon font from the Slab Serif typeface.
It’s a cute monospaced font, and it’s created dubbed it as a love letter to the typewriter.’
9. Walter
Walter works great to make a statement with your design (logos and branding).
Its sharp ends and straight and clean lines make it an ideal font to use for fashion, and cinematic niches.
It even works great with the science fiction niche. Its modernness, masculineness, and boldness remind you of futuristic technology and unknown worlds.
There are other monospaced fonts that you can use in your designs, content, ads, and coding. For example, Igoe, Vintama, Enigma, system code, and Bistro font.
There are still loads of quirky, fun, casual, serious, exciting, and dramatic monospaced fonts out there.
What are Monospaced Fonts Used For?
While most monospaced fonts look simple and give off a minimalist vibe, they are practical to use in some cases and look classier and more remarkable than other fonts depending on the situation.
There are also more monospaced font advantages.
Monospaced fonts have their design style, and some of those styles fit well with different online media content such as ads, designs that need to make a statement, ASCII Art and infographics, etc.
You can use monospaced fonts to make it easier for your audience to read content, text, or even programming codes since it facilitates easy reading or skimming.
In addition, you can use monospaced fonts to display finance transactions (debit/credit card bills, etc.) in digital form.
Moreover, you can use it to show mathematic numbers, such as a computerized math quiz, etc.
1. Programming
The Monospaced font family is popular with programmers and programming language developers.
The characters of all monospaced fonts are spaced with the same width, and in other words, these fonts have individual letters.
Individual characters don’t mean characters are separate and don’t look like a proper word when typed.
Instead, it means that we can see all the individual letters and characters that make up a word clearly at a glance.
It’s a great property to have when you’re using it for programming languages. If even one character is written wrong, forgotten, or misplaced, the programs won’t execute right, so the programmer will need to reread the code to find the mistakes.
With any monospaced font, it’s easier to read the code and locate errors because the characters are separately spaced or individual.
2. Typing Numerals
When you want to type tabular figures in finance and mathematics, you can use monospaced fonts for the best effect.
Monospaced fonts like courier or Roboto work well with numbers because the monospaced font definition says that all characters have a uniform width.
Not only will this constant width make the numbers more visible on-screen, but it will also make it possible for all the numbers and characters such as decimal points to align in one column.
How did Monospaced Fonts Originate?
The monospaced font dates back to the typewriter days, and in fact, it was invented because of the limitations that typewriters had.
For example, whenever a writer pressed a key on the typewriter, the carriage would move the paper an equal distance every time.
Because of this, monospaced fonts were invented since each character is an equal distance from the other and takes the same horizontal space.
People preferred the monospaced font for typewriters because no matter which character key was pressed, the page would move an equal distance forward, so letters had uniform lengths.
The original Courier monospaced font was issued as the standard typewriter font in the 1950s, and IBM commissioned it for use.
Original typewriting fonts were Slab Serif typeface; however, they were monospaced slash Slab Serif because the characters were an equal distance apart.
Even after proportional fonts gained popularity and were more commonly used, monospaced fonts didn’t go obsolete. Instead, they are still used today in different aspects of life and digital media.
For example, their simple, straightforward, clean, and sharp font style makes monospace font ideal for numbers, computer program coding, etc.
When Not to Use Monospaced Fonts?
While monospaced font works excellently with numbers, statement designs, and coding, you should steer clear of them in most cases.
For large content bodies like blogs, newspaper articles, and social media posts with text graphics slides, it’s best to use proportional fonts like Serifs, San Sarif, handwriting, calligraphy, etc.
A large block of monospaced font content gets blended or mixed, making it hard to read the content.
Moreover, monospaced letters aren’t preferred for the web since fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana is easier to read on digital media. Proportional fonts have a regular spacing of characters – each character has its spacing or width.
It makes it easier for us to recognize a whole word at a glance.
Since most digital media doesn’t use monospaced fonts, it can be challenging for the human brain to recognize a complete word at a glance, but it’s possible with proportional fonts.
Besides blogs, monospaced fonts also won’t work with addresses, measurements in recipe books, textbooks, notebook covers, and other designs and print media.
However, both monospaced fonts and proportional can often be used together like postal addresses, brochures, and graphics that need text and numbers.
Final Remarks
Monospaced fonts originate from the typewriter days, and it’s still popular today in some print and online media sections. Monospaced font makes it clear that all the characters have the same width and occupy equal horizontal space.
Moreover, you can use monospaced fonts in coding or computer programming, digital baking transactions, ASCII Art, and typing numerals. However, it’s a good idea to not use monospaced fonts in large pieces of text, ads, and infographics.
Also, proportional fonts work well with webpages, books, eBooks, notebooks cover designs, etc. Monospaced fonts don’t lack personality, and you can use them to enhance your designs.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you know if your font is monospaced?
To determine if a font is monospaced, you can look for consistent spacing between characters, where each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space on the page. You can also test this by typing out a sentence in the font and checking if the letters align neatly in columns.
Are monospaced fonts easier to read?
Monospaced fonts are not necessarily easier to read than proportionally spaced fonts. While they can provide a more uniform appearance, which can be helpful in certain contexts such as coding or tabular data, they may not be as visually appealing or legible for longer blocks of text compared to proportionally spaced fonts that use typographical features such as kerning and ligatures.
Sikandar is opinionated on a diverse set of topics that include, but are not limited to, Productivity, Health, Fitness, Motivation, and Career. He is in love with the written word and writes mainly to help others on their self-actualizing journeys. A journalist by education, getting to the bottom of things is his modus operandi. Often, he finds himself moonlighting as a life coach to his family, friends, and colleagues. He can be reached at his LinkedIn for collaboration.