Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better • Hacker News Board

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#41

Post by snazz » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

tedmiston wrote: post #6

It would be nice to see a visual diff vs Courier or Courier New, particularly for development purposes.

alangpierce commented with the original announcement, which has a much better close-up comparison: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#42

Post by dbg31415 » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

Adobe has done a good job of this too.

* Source Code Pro | Adobe Fonts || https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-code-pro

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#43

Post by yawaramin » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

heyjudy wrote: post #20

Probably good for full-screen writing. Anywho. Feel free to add an opinion, I've been evaluating and whittling choices of fonts for code development: So far Monaco and Source Code Pro seem best. - Fira Mono https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Mono - Hack https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ - Inconsolata https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata - Monaco http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco-font.…

For coding, I really like Iosevka: http://typeof.net/Iosevka/

It's narrow, so fits more by width; and also quite sharp and easy to read. Plus it has a nice standard set of ligatures for the symbols I use daily.

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#44

Post by feelix » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #37

munificent wrote: post #25

This is a really neat solution to a very constrained problem space. For those who don't know, Hollywood lives and breathes 12 point Courier. It is the standard font for screenplays. Producers won't even look at a script that is set in anything else because it implies the author doesn't know industry culture and norms. Also, by having a standard font size and metrics, it means that the number of pages in a script dire…

Thanks for explaining this. I was having trouble to understand what was the concrete problem this font was trying to solve. That makes a lot of sense. Especially the standardization of text length to determine actual playtime.

didn't the very first paragraph fta make things sufficiently clear?

"Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time."

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#45

Post by rntz » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 3:03 AM UTC

snazz wrote: post #40

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know the history, but I've long wondered if it was because digital Courier was based on the (thin) metal typewriter letterforms, rather than the letters set to paper which would presumably have (thicker) bleed. That is precisely why. Courier New was digitised off an IBM Selectric typeball, and they didn't correct for the ink bleed which the typeball was designed for.

Do you know why the people who digitized Courier made that (seemingly grave) omission? It seems like far too big of an oversight to simply sweep under the rug, after comparing the on-screen/printed-from-computer version with the typewriter version.

This is actually a common problem with digitisations of metal fonts, not specific to Courier. Many (although not all; Adobe's been pretty good about avoiding this particular failing, for example) of them are too anemic for screen use at body text size, presumably (although I have no hard evidence) because of not taking account of ink bleed. Victims include Bembo (the first one, not Bembo Book, which partially fixes this), several Caslons, Sabon, Janson, (an extreme example) Simoncini Garamond, and even Computer Modern (where the problem wasn't so much a transition from metal to digital, since Computer Modern was designed digitally, but from METAFONT - which can be parameterized, allowing "blackness" to be adjusted for ink spread - to Type 1 - which isn't).

Speculating a bit, one of the problems that digitisers may have encountered is that ink bleed affects fonts differently at different sizes. At small point sizes, ink bleed is proportionally large relative to the stroke width; at large point sizes, ink bleed has negligible effect. This is actually exactly what you want for readability's sake: at small sizes, you want to avoid thin strokes, and ink bleed does exactly that. At large size, "thin" strokes aren't actually thin any more. But a perfectly scalable digital font does not capture this beneficial effect of ink spread.

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#46

Post by mark-r » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 3:49 AM UTC

cryo wrote: post #2

It is a bit confusing that the body text of the site has set Avenir Next as font family.

Courier in any incarnation is not appropriate as a body text except in certain contexts. One of those contexts is screenplays as noted in the link, the other is code samples. As a monospaced font it doesn't look good for general text.

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#47

Post by mark-r » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

arthurfm wrote: post #7

topkai22 wrote: post #3

Does it allow me to hit the page count of my essay even easier?

You might be interested in Times Newer Roman. [1] It's like Times New Roman, but 5-10% wider so enables you to write 13% fewer words. [1] https://timesnewerroman.com/

Times New Roman was designed to fit a lot of text on a newspaper page. Its popularity is completely due to it being an accessible default in early software, not to any intrinsic superiority in presentation. I consider it to be quite ugly, although not as bad as Arial.

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#48

Post by tom_ » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

tom_ wrote: post #28

heyjudy wrote: post #20

Probably good for full-screen writing. Anywho. Feel free to add an opinion, I've been evaluating and whittling choices of fonts for code development: So far Monaco and Source Code Pro seem best. - Fira Mono https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Mono - Hack https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ - Inconsolata https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata - Monaco http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco-font.…

My preferred font is the X 6x13 one ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html ), as I prefer pixel fonts. On Windows I have antialiasing disabled and use 6x13 everywhere. I use a TrueType version (that of course only works at one point size) for programs that don' On OS X, you can't disable antialiasing, and some programs InputMonoCondensed: http://input.fontbureau.com/ 11pt InputMonoCondensed on OS X is the s…

Ugh, looks like i managed to submit this half baked post that I was writing earlier and intended to discard. Oops!

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#49

Post by neverartful » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 4:26 AM UTC

Neat! This post reminded me of a mobile app I started developing, but then abandoned it. I planned to create an iOS app that would cater to drama clubs to help the cast members learn their lines. The motivation for me was to create something that might be beneficial for the arts (in some tiny way), and this app was the only thing that came to mind.

Re: Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

#50

Post by smbullet » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

alangpierce wrote: post #38

Looks like here's the original announcement, which has more background on motivations and has a comparison with regular Courier: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

John August also talks about it in episode 74 of his podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes: http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk

Although you need to pay to access archived podcasts they have all of them transcribed: http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-74-three-hole-punc...

I highly recommend the podcast to anyone even remotely interested in the movie industry. I've been listening for around 6 months now and can't stop.