Monospaced Font

A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal 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.

Note that this article generally assumes Western (Latin-based, Cyrillic, or Greek) writing systems. East Asian rules of typography, for example, require CJK fonts to always be monospaced at least as far as the main characters for writing words (i.e. not punctuation) are concerned. Other scripts vary in their use of monospaced fonts.