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Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

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

#81

Post by Joeboy »

mcv wrote: post #64
whoisjuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be impo…

> Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate.

Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that? People hand round paper screenplays, or bits of screenplays, all the time, especially on set. It's much more practical for lots of purposes. Abandoning the minute-per-page rule of thumb (or equally importantly pages-per-shooting-day targets) would create way more problems than it solves.

However, it's also true that if you receive a screenplay that's not in standard screenplay format, it's a very reliable indication that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. Not a perfect heuristic, but there are maybe hundreds of thousands of spec scripts in circulation of which a few dozen a year get picked up by studios. So they can afford to be picky.

Bonus trivia: As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're George Miller.

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

#82

Post by scott_s »

mcv wrote: post #74
jforberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Screenplays contain more than just lines.

Even so, using the number of words to describe events to estimate the time those events will take to play out, seems like asking for trouble.

And yet. It's a rough heuristic, good enough for its purpose.

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

#83

Post by chasingthewind »

mcv wrote: post #64
whoisjuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be impo…

>I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time.

Agreed. Here's a fun counterexample:

2001: A Space Oddyssey

Screenplay length: 65 pages

Run length: 161 minutes

:)

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

#84

Post by asjo »

feelix wrote: post #44
whoisjuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)

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

#85

Post by WorldMaker »

mcv wrote: post #64
whoisjuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be impo…

In addition to using a very standard font, screenplays have a lot of other very strict formatting guidelines involving use of things like particular whitespace rhythms.

It's the combination of the whole, including and especially the whitespace rhythms (which are still connected to font metrics, of course), that lead to the 1 page is approximately 1 minute guideline metric, because scene descriptions and actions have different whitespace from dialog.

Interestingly, compared to your expectation that a Tarantino screenplay would be more dense than the Fury Road screenplay, it is actually dialog that has a lot more whitespace overall in the screenplay format (they are subject to smaller inner columns) than scene descriptions/action descriptions (which use the full width of the page). Word count wise, action involves a lot more prose than dialog and many of the best action screenplays have more overall word count than a more dialog-heavy screenplay. (What I've seen of the Fury Road screenplay read like a novel, though as is pointed out elsewhere it is fascinating because it was written storyboard first, which is the exception rather than the rule.)

The screenplay format really is a fascinating thing to study. There are some great books out there on the screenplay format and how it came to be what it is today.

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

#86

Post by peapicker »

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.…

No has mentioned it yet, but for coding and terminal windows, I've tried almost all of the others listed here, but I prefer and keep going back to DejaVu Sans Mono.

( https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ )

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

#87

Post by Banksy_is_Qanon »

mcv wrote: post #64
whoisjuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be impo…

It SEEMS like a pointless metric, yes. But many studies have been done to prove that one minute of screenplay text tends to produce one minute of a motion picture.

It’s not like people randomly decided that a page of text probably equals a minute of screen time — rather, they realized that a page of text tends to equal one minute of screen time AFTER doing enough script->movie translations that they were able to discern that roughly 1:1 ratio.

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

#88

Post by kbenson »

elcomet wrote: post #72
kbenson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about how old it is, and more about how long it's been out of the general public consciousness. The courier font hasn't been (out of public view) in recent memory, so it doesn't have the same nostalgia factor.

Courier font has been in public memory for a very long time (but most certainly people didn't know its name). It is much more known than IMAP is, and most importantly, has been for decades It's an industry standard for screenplays, and I think we all remember having seen a screenplay in a movie or picture, with this weird monospace font. You are certainly an outlier here.

You read my comment as the opposite of what I said. Specifically, I said "The courier font hasn't been (out of public view) in recent memory". That is, there's no nostalgia, because it never left. And I'm not saying anything about IMAP, I'm saying something about Courier IMAP, which even as IMAP goes, hasn't been in favor for a long time.

Being a top level comment, I would assume my comment is read with at least the submission title in mind, as that was my intention. I was noting that I initially interpreted it as referring to Courier MTA / IMAP (and referenced IMAP servers to distinguish which Courier I was referring to).

So, to be very clear since apparently event my clarifications are being misconstrued, the courier font has been in public consciousness for as long as I can remember. I believe the courier MTA is not in the public consciousness any more. If this submission, titled "Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better" was talking about mail servers (specifically, original courier and a cleaned up fork of courier as the title would theoretically allude to), then that would have been a cool blast from the past. It's not about mail servers being things of the past, mail servers was just used as a way to explain what other courier I thought it was originally referring to.

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

#89

Post by da_chicken »

chasingthewind wrote: post #83
mcv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be impo…

>I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Agreed. Here's a fun counterexample: 2001: A Space Oddyssey Screenplay length: 65 pages Run length: 161 minutes :)

A movie famous (infamous, even) for it's significant non-verbal presentation? That sounds like an exception proving the rule.

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

#90

Post by blacksmith_tb »

asjo wrote: post #84
feelix wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)

I would think they were typed on manual typewriters (so the tradition of using Courier probably stems from those days).
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