Monaco (typeface)

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Typeface	Monaco
Category	Sans-serif
Classifications	Monospace
Designer(s)	Susan Kare
Foundry	Apple Computer

Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. The face shipped with Mac OS X and was already present with previous versions of the Mac operating system. Unlike many monospaced typefaces originating with strike-on typewriting faces, Monaco does not immediately reveal the consistency of character width. Characters are distinct, and it is difficult to confuse 0 (figure zero) and O (uppercase O), or 1 (figure one) | (Vertical bar) and l (lowercase l).

Monaco has been released 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.