Four Free Fixed Width Fonts

If you're looking for a font with a digital feel, White Rabbit may be the typeface you're looking for. Not only does this font have a technical style that reminds one of the first personal computers, but it is a fairly complete font. Most punctuation marks and symbols are available with the typeface, with the exception of a few of the less common characters. It does not offer accented letters, but White Rabbit can be used to set even lengthy blocks of text easily.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is an exceptionally useful font. While it is not decorative, the font's character set is complete — and it is available in italic and bold versions, as well as a bold italic version. The typeface is very easy to read, even if you've got long pages of computer code or other technical information to layout. Legible and simple, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has a flexibility not always available when you're looking at free fonts.

An elegant sans serif font, Sax Mono has a very different style than many of the fixed width fonts you may encounter. Rather than focusing on a digital style — or creating a font reminiscent of a typewriter, the creator of this typeface designed a font that appeals to desktop publishers. The fact that it's useful for projects requiring a fixed width font seems like an afterthought. Sax Mono is a complete font: in addition to letters and numerals, it has a full complement of symbols and accented characters.

More than a few fixed width fonts bring a typewriter to mind, and Selectric is no exception. The style is common with good reason — many typewriters could only use fixed width fonts to print letters. Selectric remains a very clean font, however: it does have serifs, but they are relatively minimalistic. With the full character set available for Selectric, you could use it to set long blocks of text effectively. It may even provide a touch of the past, reminding readers of the days when they used typewriters.

Because fixed width fonts can be crucial in technical projects, it's useful to have a variety of fonts at hand that you can work with. Many sites offering free fonts actually maintain a category of fixed width fonts, such as Dafont does. Such sites will save you the hassle of searching through listings and trying to see if a font appears to be fixed width from the samples provided.