Nearly all web pages today use styled text via means of what’s known as Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. However, one portion of web design that’s largely ignored is reading anything in teletype/monospaced text. Web forms, programming code, block-quoting in forums and a whole bunch of other stuff use a teletype font often. Since most designers ignore specifying a teletype font, what happens is that your browser reverts to a system setting to display it.
In the Windows environment, the default font for teletype/monospace is Courier New; an ancient font that was designed for 640×480 displays with no anti-aliasing originally. On modern displays it looks terrible.
The font I personally suggest to use as an alternative to Courier New is Cousine; a free font that is much easier to read.
You can download the Cousine font here. On that page, click "Download your Collection" and from the small pop-up click "Download the font families in your Collection as a zip-file". In the ZIP, the four fonts there will be Cousine Regular, Cousine Italic, Cousine Bold and Cousine Bold Italic. Install all four.
Once the Cousine fonts are installed, close your browser and restart it. You need to do this so the font list resets to reflect the new fonts installed.
After that, you’ll have to instruct your web browser to always use Cousine whenever it encounters un-styled teletype text.
In Internet Explorer
- Tools
- Internet Options
- General (tab)
- Fonts (button)
- Choose Cousine from "Plain text font" area
- Click OK
- Restart the browser
In Firefox
- Firefox Menu
- Options/Options
- Content (tab)
- Advanced (button, under "Fonts & Colors")
- Click drop-down menu next to "Monospace", select Cousine
- Click OK
- Restart the browser
In Google Chrome
- Tools (wrench icon, top right)
- Options
- Under the Hood (sidebar menu, left)
- Customize fonts… (button)
- Select "Fixed-width font" drop-down as Cousine.
- Scroll back up (if necessary), click X to close, it will auto-save, close tab.
- Restart the browser
Testing your newly-selected teletype/monospace font
The easiest way to test your new teletype font is to load up a plain text file in the browser; this will show nothing but the monospace font because it’s all plain text.
The example I’m using below is http://www.textfiles.com/internet/bd_appd.txt if you want to use that for your own testing purposes.
This is how it would look using the ancient Courier New:
This is how it looks using Cousine:
As you can plainly see, Cousine in anti-aliased form is rounder, thicker and a much easier read on the eyes.
Other freebie monospace fonts available, and other uses where they come in handy
Google Web Fonts in particular has some really good choices for teletype/monospace/terminal style fonts.
Why is Google Web Fonts so good? Because the vast majority of the fonts available are complete. With monospace fonts in particular this is absolutely mandatory. To the best of my knowledge there are no fonts in GWF that are missing any characters/glyphs; any font in there is a complete set literally from A to Z and everywhere in between.
What applications are proper teletype fonts for besides web browsers? If you work in a corporate IT environment where you have to periodically access a mainframe via a terminal client in Windows, using better monospace fonts will be a godsend. For printing (as in print-to-paper) purposes, using modern teletype fonts look a whole lot better and are much easier to read.
Rich’s Recommendations for better teletype fonts
Download these the same way you did Cousine as noted above. The download link will be all the way at the bottom for each font link you visit below.
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