Andalé Mono
| Company type | Typeface / Font |
|---|---|
| Industry | Typography |
| Founder | Steve Matteson |
| Products | Monospaced sans-serif fonts for software development and terminal emulation |
Andalé Mono (also known as Andale Mono) is a monospaced sans-serif typeface created by Steve Matteson specifically for software development and terminal emulation purposes. It was initially developed for the Taligent initiative, a joint venture between Apple Inc. and IBM. Andalé Mono has a closely related counterpart named Andalé Sans.
IBM's heritage
Reflecting its roots in the Apple-IBM Taligent partnership, the font’s glyph collection includes numerous IBM-specific symbols originally found in IBM Courier (1991). Certain glyphs, such as those representing card suits, share identical designs with IBM Courier. The dotted zero character, believed to be inspired by displays from IBM 3270, is also part of the set.
Distribution
At first, this typeface was distributed as an add-on for Internet Explorer 4.0 under the name Monotype.com. From version 1.25 onward, it was renamed Andalé Mono and packaged with Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6. However, it is not included in more recent editions of Microsoft Windows (beginning with Windows 2000/ME), where it was superseded by Lucida Console. Andalé Mono continues to be accessible through the Core fonts for the Web collection on SourceForge and remains part of the default font set in macOS.
Commercial editions
The Andalé Mono typeface family marketed by Ascender Corporation features TrueType versions with bold and italic styles, supporting the WGL character repertoire.
Monotype offers a version of Andalé Mono that excludes italics and provides more limited coverage of Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin Extended-A/B scripts compared to Ascender’s edition. This variant is available in OpenType CFF, TrueType, and PostScript formats. Monotype additionally produces language-specific versions covering Cherokee, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets.
Andale Mono WT
Designed for comprehensive international character support, Andale Mono WT is compliant with Unicode 3.0 standards; WT stands for WorldType.
This family includes specialized versions such as Andale Mono WT J, K, S, and T, which cater to Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese writing systems respectively. The Andale Mono WTG and WTG Surrogate editions extend compatibility to Unicode 3.2; the Surrogate edition further supports characters beyond the U+FFFF code point.
These commercial variants are sold under names like Unicode Font Package for SAP by Ricoh and KYOmulticode 1.0 by Kyocera. A rasterized form of Andale Mono WTG is also included with FontLab Studio 5.