Consolas


Consolas is a monospaced typeface, designed by Luc de Groot. It is a part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It has been included with Windows since Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and is available for download from Microsoft. It is the only standard Windows Vista font with a slash through the zero character.

Characteristics

Consolas supports the following OpenType layout features: stylistic alternates, localized forms, uppercase-sensitive forms, oldstyle figures, lining figures, arbitrary fractions, superscript, subscript.
Although Consolas is designed as a replacement for Courier New, only 713 glyphs were initially available, as compared to Courier New 's 1318 glyphs. In version 5.22, support for Greek Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks For Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Box Drawing, Geometric Shapes was added. In version 5.32 the total number of supported glyphs was 2735. In version 7.0 there are totally 3030 glyphs.

Availability

This font, along with Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Corbel and Constantia, is also distributed with Microsoft Excel Viewer, Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac.
Consolas is also available for licensing from Ascender Corporation.
Bare Bones Software has licensed the font from Ascender for use in their text editor BBEdit.

Alternatives

DMCA Sans Serif is an open source, metric compatible replacement of Consolas, providing 8 font weights to roughly match Consolas' 9. It used to be simply called "Consolas", but legal reasons promoted the name change to a reference of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Inconsolata, an open source font inspired by Consolas, is available on Google Fonts.