While similar to Verdana, Tahoma has a narrower body, smaller counters, much tighter letter spacing, and a more complete Unicode character set.

In contrast with some other sans-serif typefaces, including Arial, the uppercase "I" (eye) is distinguishable from lowercase "l" (ell), which is especially important in technical publications.

[citation needed] In an interview by Daniel Will-Harris, Carter acknowledged that Tahoma has some similarities with his earlier Bell Centennial typeface.

Leopard also shipped with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif, Arial Unicode, and Wingdings.

Before Wine included a Tahoma replacement font, some applications, such as Steam, would not display any text at all, rendering them nearly unusable.