Weird terminal font?

why does the terminal not display fonts as they should be? the spacing between the characters is all weird, some characters are too close together, often there is a huge space between letters, etc. Here is what it looks like now. Note the amount of space between the letters, even though the spacing is set to zero. Why won't the terminal just display fonts as they normally display everywhere else?

http://umsis.miami.edu/~silnycky/terminalfont.png

The Terminal is designed to use "monospaced" fonts. (A monospaced font is one in which every letter has the same width...W is the same width as I, for example.) Typewriters and teleprinters used monospaced fonts, and so did early computers. Many Unix command-line applications depend on single-sized characters to display properly, and so the Terminal makes that assumption.

If you try to use a "proportional" font (Like Times) then the Terminal will "pad" each character with enough space to make them the same size. This looks really weird.

Terminal looks best if you use a real monospaced font, like Monaco or Courier.