Fixedsys

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Fixedsys in Central European, Cyrillic, Western, Greek, and Turkish versions

Fixedsys is a family of raster monospaced fonts for Windows. The name means fixed system, although it is often pronounced "fixed size" because its glyphs are monospace or fixed-width (although bolded characters are wider than non-bolded, unlike other monospace fonts such as Courier). It is the oldest font in Windows, and was the system font in Windows 1.0 and 2.0. For Windows 3.x, the system font was changed to a sans-serif font named System (used in menu bars, for instance). However, many applications used MS Sans Serif (previously "Helv") for their windows and dialogs.

Fixedsys fonts family contains fonts encoded in several Windows code pages, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fixedsys fonts of different code pages have different point sizes.

The glyphs for the upper areas of each one appear to be drawn separately, not taken from a single master set, as there are visible differences in the appearance of various characters that are shared between the code pages. As of 2007, none of the Fixedsys fonts have been updated to support the Euro sign.

Fixedsys attempts to emulate the ASCII system font shown during the boot process on most PCs, and all older ones.^{[verification needed]}

In Windows 95, 98, and Windows Me, Fixedsys is used as the default font for Notepad. This font was superseded by Lucida Console in Notepad for later versions of Windows. In Windows 95, this default font cannot be changed. Fixedsys of other code pages can be selected by specifying script settings in font selection dialogue, but not font of all code pages can be chosen.

Due to its clean style and easy readability, it has enjoyed some popularity with the programming community, even giving rise to an imitation font - Fixedsys Excelsior - which, based on the original Fixedsys typeface, also includes a large number of Unicode script ranges.

Fixedsys is used as the default font in the IRC chat program mIRC.