Terminal (typeface)

Terminal is a family of monospaced raster typefaces. It is relatively small compared with Courier. It uses crossed zeros, and is designed to approximate the font normally used in MS-DOS or other text-based consoles such as on Linux. In Microsoft Windows, it is used as the default font in the Command Prompt in Windows 7 and earlier.

The font Terminal at various resolutions

Terminal font family contains fonts encoded in various DOS code pages, with multiple resolutions of the font for each code page. Fixedsys fonts of different code pages have different point sizes. Under DBCS Windows environment, specifying Terminal font may also cause application to use non-Terminal fonts when displaying texts.

In Windows 2000 or later, changing script setting in some application's font dialogue (e.g., Notepad, WordPad) causes Terminal font to look completely different, even under same font size. Similarly, changing language setting for Windows applications that do not support Unicode will alter the appearance of OEM/DOS scripted Terminal font.

Terminal is also the font that most text pads from ASCII art should be viewed as, because Terminal is often a visual font.

Terminal is based upon code page 437 (or other codepage with suitable language, such as CP850) and is not aligned with Unicode. Most of the characters in Terminal are the same as the characters used in code page 437, but some of the characters (most Greek letters and some box drawing characters) may or may not have been replaced by additional accented letters, depending on the codepage of the system. However, if a font size of 5 pt. is used, the Greek letters and box drawing characters are still viewable.

Also according to some strings hidden in the file, the original Terminal font size (9x12) was designed in 1984 by Bitstream Inc., also the DOSAPP.FON which is used by Windows for showing DOS applications in the window is basically Terminal with new sizes added, resulting from the strings that the typeface was designed in 1991 by Microsoft Corporation. Also the CGA and EGA versions of the Terminal font exists, but they shares similarities with the IBM CGA font, with slightly differences at characters, also the fonts are designed in 1984 by Bitstream Inc.