| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Monospace |
| Designer(s) | Susan Kare |
| Foundry | Apple Inc. |
Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. The face shipped with all versions of Mac OS X (including version 10.6) and was already present with previous versions of the Mac operating system. Characters are distinct, and it is difficult to confuse 0 (figure zero) and O (uppercase O), or 1 (figure one) | (Vertical bar) I (uppercase i) 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.
In Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Monaco was replaced as the default Terminal font by Menlo, a font based on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, like the popular font DejaVu Sans Mono.[1] However, Monaco remains preloaded on all Snow Leopard systems.
