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Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

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71–80 of 97 posts

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

#71

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

That's from 2013. I wonder how successful the font has been in Hollywood over the last 6 years.

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

#72
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMAP is much more recent than the Courier font, so you should feel young here.

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.

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

#73
post #61
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably your browser falling back to a default font. Sure that Courier Prime includes that symbol?

Perhaps the webfont on that page uses a subset and maybe the author of the page has the font also installed locally, so fallback would choose the locally installed font. I can see how it could happen without noticing and most people would not spot a single wrong character on the page when looking at it.

That might explain it. Otherwise, this would be very weird for a "Europhilic" example.

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

#74
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…

> 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.

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

#75

After years of switching between programming fonts, I finally settled on SF Mono. Not planning to switch any time soon (and hopefully ever).

I was about to write the same thing. I code in XCode and I love SF Mono. I was pretty invested in source code pro but SF mono is so good.

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

#76

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…

If hollywood producers are so famously picky, I wonder if they will reject a script with this font because it simply looks different. I don't think you'll be able to explain to them that it is metrically identical, just like you can't explain to your garbage man that you are using a decomposable plastic bag, but they have the strict order to not accept plastic in your organic trash (if you live in the kind of place t…

The thing with decomposable bags is that it's a bit more complicated. Take a look at the marketing issues section in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_bag

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

#77
post #44

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."

As a non-seasoned complete outsider, I thought this part of the article was somehow being dryly facetious or sarcastic or something. Kinda good to have somebody to provide context, actually.

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

#78
post #73
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the webfont on that page uses a subset and maybe the author of the page has the font also installed locally, so fallback would choose the locally installed font. I can see how it could happen without noticing and most people would not spot a single wrong character on the page when looking at it.

That might explain it. Otherwise, this would be very weird for a "Europhilic" example.

Honestly, it would also be quite weird for a font these days to not have the full set of common-use Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic. So I'd assume a simple mistake here instead of forgotten important glyphs.

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

#79

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…

If hollywood producers are so famously picky, I wonder if they will reject a script with this font because it simply looks different. I don't think you'll be able to explain to them that it is metrically identical, just like you can't explain to your garbage man that you are using a decomposable plastic bag, but they have the strict order to not accept plastic in your organic trash (if you live in the kind of place t…

I think that that's the point of it being metrically identical.

You can work in Courier Prime any time you want, and then switch to Courier for submitting your screenplay without worrying about it changing the pagination.

So it can help out any time you are working on your screenplay or working on it with anyone you know won't care, both before and after submission.

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