Font

Minecraft's font is made up of a grid of dots (based on an Northern European code page from MS-DOS). Each character supported by the font is between 1 and 6 dots wide, although most are 5. Characters not supported by the font have thinner lines and use computer pixels instead of bigger dots. This will also happen when using certain languages, like French or Pirate. Text is normally white in chat and black on signs, but it can be changed with color codes.

Trivia

 * Random text will only choose random characters with the same width as the original, and when in a language like French or Pirate, you can see the original text without it being random.
 * Certain letters with certain accents are supported by the font, but not all. GNU Unifont is used for many languages like French or Pirate.
 * The only 6-dot-wide characters are ®, ~, and @. Filling a sign with 6-dot-wide characters will make text protrude off the sign.