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

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

#91

Post by anonytrary » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #63

anonytrary wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that's a thing! Although 13% doesn't sound like a significant amount. The trick I used in high school: Write the essay. If it's too short by 20-30%, increase the verbosity in every place you can until it's long enough. If it's short by more than 30% then you have bigger problems. If your essay only needs an extra page on a 15 page assignment, chances are you can add fluff and easily hit the 15 page mark.

I think I'd have more use for the opposite: a font that's 13% narrower , to stuff more words into a page limit. It's harder to make text more concise than more verbose!

Yes, I agree. Concision is an art, verbosity is a chore.

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

#92

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

rntz wrote: post #45

snazz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Ah ha! I've long thought that of the Garamonds as well, it just never seemed as extreme as with Courier.

The point you bring up with different proportional amounts of bleed at different sizes is also quite relevant.

OpenType fonts have so many options now... I almost wonder if it would make the most sense to have a bleed option built into the rasterizer that could have defaults set by the typeface designer, but also adjusted by the user (e.g. more bleed when using white-on-black). There are so many arcane options on macOS's OS-level typeface options palette, it seems pretty reasonable.

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

#93

Post by mcv » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

Joeboy wrote: post #81

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…

> 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 cr…

> 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?

Get the digital version. We're talking about a computer font here, so the script exists in digital form.

> 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.

And it worked very well. It makes a lot of sense for a very visual movie.

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

#94

Post by vsl » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

ignoranceprior wrote: post #11

Why does the ř (r with háček diacritic) in the "Europhilic" Czech text sample appear so different from the normal letter r? Is it intentional? It's quite jarring to me. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/h6yNHCo.png

Glyph not present in the font, so browser substitutes some other. I assumed the page chooses the sample dynamically based on my location (see also: totally wrong machine translation). If this is hardcoded, then it doesn’t speak well about the author that they wouldn’t notice it (and if shows lack of awareness of non-English, Latin alphabet using, languages).

Practically speaking, of course, a full Unicode font is an enormous undertaking, hence so many fonts lacking diacritics other than Latin-1.

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

#95

Post by bjcy » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #85

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…

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…

Any top recommendations for those books? Super intrigued to read more.

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

#96

Post by WorldMaker » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

bjcy wrote: post #95

WorldMaker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any top recommendations for those books? Super intrigued to read more.

The big one that left a lasting impression for me at an early age was Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434. It does a very good job illustrating a lot of the technical mechanics of the format and the Hollywood guidelines and expectations that have built up around it (including the page per minute expectation, and even the expectations on page per act, which is another formula that Hollywood has), and some of why, using an example screenplay throughout.

(Just be forewarned it is not a great example screenplay in the usual fashion of such teaching examples because it is designed more towards the lesson plan than coherency/quality as a story of its own; and also arguably another example of that old weird maxim "those who can't, teach" given Lew Hunter's mostly TV Movie writer IMDB credits.)

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

#97

Post by yuripinto » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 7:26 AM UTC

Some time ago I actually designed a visual identity for an architect using Courier Prime Sans (https://www.behance.net/gallery/60374133/Juliana-Camara-Abit...). In that case I was more interest in its visual attributes - monospaced type that implies technical ability, but with a friendlier, softer character.