Monospace
Also called: non-proportional, fixed-width or fixed-pitch
The typographical term monospace refers to fonts whose letters and other characters (including spaces) all occupy the same width. This is in contrast to proportional fonts, where, for example, a w occupies more setting width than an i. In monospace fonts, all characters are centered within a fixed space.
Monospaced fonts are commonly used for unformatted text. This is the case, for example, in unformatted e-mail messages and on many typewriters. Because letters are always directly below one another, text can be formatted using spaces. For this reason, non-proportional fonts are also widely used for ASCII art and in the user interfaces of software to edit programming code.
Some popular monospace fonts are Courier, Courier New, Monospace, Lucida Console and Consolas.
