Printing · Receipt Glossary
Monospace Font
A font where every character takes the same width. Used on receipts because it produces clean column alignment.
Monospace (or fixed-width) fonts assign each character the same horizontal space — unlike proportional fonts where an "i" is narrower than an "M". This makes column alignment trivial for receipt printers, which is why nearly every receipt you’ve ever held used one.
Common monospace fonts on receipts include Courier, OCR-A (the bank-cheque font), Lucida Console, and proprietary thermal-printer fonts like Epson’s default ESC/POS Font A.
On a typical 80mm thermal receipt, monospace fonts produce 32-42 characters per line depending on size. Cashiers and accountants can scan items and prices vertically because everything aligns into perfect columns.
Modern receipt designers are increasingly experimenting with proportional fonts (especially for emailed PDFs), but in-store paper receipts still overwhelmingly use monospace.
See this in action
Brands whose receipts demonstrate monospace font.
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