Monospacing

Alternatively called fixed-pitch and fixed spacing, monospacing is a printer or software program's ability to print each character in the same amount of space regardless of the character. As shown in the picture, with proportional spacing the letter 'w' takes up more spacing than the other letters. However, the monospaced version of the same font has equal spacing for each character.

The font or fixed-width font must have a monospacing version to enable monospacing. In HTML (hypertext markup language) and web design, you can create a CSS (cascading style sheets) rule similar to the example below.

.mono {
 font-family:monospace;
}

Using the above CSS code would give text similar to the example below.

This sentence is an example of monospaced text.

Character, Typography terms