Monospace font

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Courier is a common monospace typeface

A monospaced font, also called a fixed-width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters each occupy the same amount of space. This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another.

The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. This also meant that monospaced fonts need not be typeset like variable width fonts and were, arguably, easier to deal with.

[edit] Use in computers

Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font for the console. Even though computers can now display a wide variety of fonts, almost every commercial IDE and software text editor employs a monospaced font as the default typeface. The reason for this comes as a convenience to programmers, in that it increases readability in code. Monospaced fonts are found to be far less readable for long bodies of text, making them ill-suited for books or magazine articles.^{[citation needed]} Other uses include terminal emulation and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. Another use, found in technical manuals and resources, is to distinguish words such as "for" with the commonly used for used in programming, and to set apart blocks of code from readable text. Examples of monospaced typefaces are Courier, Prestige Elite, and Monaco.