Monospaced font

Multiple art forms have developed within computers' and typewriters' monospaced typographic settings in which the nth character of every line align vertically with each other. (Such a group of characters is sometimes called a column.) A proportional and monospaced font's reproduction of an element of ANSI art, line drawing, is illustrated below. The failure of a proportional font to reproduce the desired boxes above motivates monospaced fonts' use in the creation and viewing of ASCII and ANSI art. Some poetry composed monospaced on typewriters or computers also depends on the vertical alignment of character columns. E. E. Cummings' poetry is often set in monospaced type for this reason. Some classic video games (e.g. Rogue and NetHack) and those imitating their style (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) use a monospaced grid of characters to render their state for the player. Quiz Show (1976) is believed to be the first video game to use 8×8 monospaced "arcade font", which got widely adopted by computer games of the time. == Tabular figures ==

(shown above), contains both proportional (left) and tabular (right) figures. CSS can be used to choose between these two sets of numeral glyphs. Many fonts that generally are not monospaced have numerals that are known as tabular figures. As tabular spacing makes all numbers with the same number of digits the same width, it is used for typesetting documents such as price lists, stock listings and sums in mathematics textbooks, all of which require columns of numbers to line up on top of each other for easier comparison. Tabular spacing is also a common feature of simple printing devices such as cash registers and date-stamps. Fonts intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make the bold numbers take up the same width as the numbers in regular style; the consistency between styles is called "duplexing". numerals in Concourse. The bold and non-bold digits have the same width. The alternative to tabular spacing is proportional spacing, which places the numbers closely together, reducing empty space in a document, and is thought to allow the numbers to blend into the text more effectively. ==Other uses==

In biochemistry, monospaced fonts are preferred for displaying nucleic acid and protein sequences, as they ensure that the representation of every nucleotide or amino acid occupies the same amount of space. Alignment of the letters makes it easier to compare different sequences visually. Both screenplays and stage play scripts frequently use monospaced fonts, to make it easier to judge the time a script will last for from the number of pages. The industry standard is 12 point Courier. A tradition holds that, on this format, one page of script will take one minute of screen or stage time. Monospaced fonts are frequently used in tablature music for guitar and bass guitar. Each line in a tabulature represents a guitar string, which requires that chords played across multiple strings be tabbed in vertical sequence, a feat accomplished only with the predictability of fixed width. ==See also==