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

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

#51

Post by saulrh » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 5:05 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #26

This is great. Also, making it heavier is 1,000% necessary -- Courier has always been so anemic it can actually be difficult to read when printed (and Courier New is even worse). 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. Now I just wonder if s…

    Now I just wonder if script readers will react "ooh,
    I don't know why but this looks nice" or "ugh,
    something's weird about this script but I can't
    tell what."

The original announcement that someone posted [1] says that Courier Prime was developed by iterating on blinded feedback from actual screenwriters reading sample screenplay manuscripts, so I'd expect it to be reliably better in practice. Interestingly, and agreeing with the comment chain explaining the history of the font and the failure to take ink-bleed into account, the feature that apparently consumed the most optimization effort was in fact the weight, which had to be refined quite a bit over successive iterations. Neat!

[1]: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

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

#52

Post by munificent » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 5:12 AM UTC

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."

It does, but it's easy to underestimate how important this is to the film industry.

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

#53

Post by IgorPartola » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

Is it just my device or is there something wrong with the r in Europhilic Dobre?

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

#54

Post by zerocrates » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

I suppose the issue with Liberation Mono is just that it looks too "different"?

If I'm recalling correctly, it was also metric-compatible with Courier, as that was largely the point of the Liberation fonts.

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

#55

Post by whoisjuan » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 6:44 AM UTC

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."

Yeah. I read that part, but I didn't know about the idiosyncrasies behind the use of the font, so it wasn't fully clear to me why was important in this industry to heavily rely on a particular font.

Also, read the HN guidelines. Comments like this degrade the quality of the discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#56

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 7:08 AM UTC

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by anilgulecha » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 7:49 AM UTC

Some more detail on courier variants for screenplays. http://www.rolandstroud.com/Fonts-1.html

For trelby[0], we recommend courier 10 point, which renders much better on more environments. [0] https://www.trelby.org/assets/courier10point.zip

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

#58

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 7:55 AM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #10

I'm not a screenwriter, but Courier Prime Code/Sans seems very interesting. Have to try it out on my various screens. The italics are a bit distracting. The subjective tilt of letters seem to vary, e.g. 'j' and 'l' may be have the same tilt but the 'l' appears more vertical (as does 'i'). Also the tilt on the center line of 'e' seems weird to me, but that's perhaps an intentional stylistic quirk.

Hack[0] is also a very nice font for coding. I use it on my terminals and IDEs with joy.

[0]: https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/

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

#59

Post by a_e_k » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 7:57 AM UTC

bwidlar wrote: post #35

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.…

I cant use any other than Luculent http://eastfarthing.com/luculent (thanks Andrew Kensler). Finding the Best Programming Font http://webagility.com/posts/finding-the-best-programming-fon...

You're very welcome! I'm glad you like it and thanks for helping to point people to it.

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

#60

Post by dajonker » Wed, Jan 02, 2019, 8:53 AM UTC

The "code" version doesn't seem to work very well for me on a screen. I'm using vim in Gnome Terminal. It seems to be much less crisp than my personal favorites, Fira Code or Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/)