Monaco (typeface)
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Monaco is a monospaced font shipping with Mac OS X and already present with previous versions of this operating system. It boasts some useful features:
- it doesn't look like a regular monospace font, usually of the mecane or typewriter-like types. Instead, it has a rounded appearance (not like comic sans) that makes it legible for reading long text.
- characters are unambiguous: one can't mistake 0 and O, or 1, | (pipe) and l (lowercase l).
Monaco has actually been made available in at least three forms. The original was a bitmap monospaced font that still appears in the ROMs of even New World Macs, and is still the default form in 9 point size even on OS X. The second is the outline form, loosely similar to Lucida Console and created as a TrueType font for System 6 and 7; this is the standard. There was briefly a third known as MPW, since it was designed to be used with the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop IDE; it was essentially a straight conversion of the bitmap font into an outline font with the addition of some of the same disambiguation features as were added to the TrueType Monaco.