Courier (typeface)

Category	Monospaced
Classification	Slab serif
Designer(s)	Howard "Bud" Kettler

Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter. The typeface was designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler in 1955. The design of the original Courier typeface was commissioned in the 1950s by IBM for use in typewriters, but they did not secure legal exclusivity to the typeface and it soon became a standard font used throughout the typewriter industry. As a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned. It has also become an industry standard for all screenplays to be written in 12 point Courier or a close variant.

The font was later redrawn by Adrian Frutiger for the IBM Selectric Composer series of electric typewriters.

12 point Courier New was also the U.S. State Department's standard typeface until January 2004, when it was replaced with 14 point Times New Roman. Reasons for the change included the desire for a more "modern" and "legible" font.^[1][2][3]

Kettler was once quoted about how the name was chosen. The font was nearly released with the name "Messenger." After giving it some thought, Kettler said, "A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability."^[2]

Variants

Courier New

Courier New is a version of Courier introduced with Windows 3.1, which also included raster Courier fonts. The font family comprises Courier New, Courier New Bold, Courier New Italic, Courier New Bold Italic. Courier New features higher line space than Courier. Punctuation marks are reworked to make the dots and commas heavier.

Version 2.76 or later includes Hebrew and Arabic glyphs, with most of Arabic added on non-italic fonts. The styling of Arabic glyphs is similar to those found in Times New Roman, but are adjusted to be monospaced.

Courier New has been updated to version 5.00, which includes over 3100 glyphs, covering over 2700 characters per font.

Although the fonts are produced by Monotype (who also own the Courier trademark and the Courier New copyrights), only Ascender Corporation sells the fonts commercially. The Ascender fonts have 'WGL' at the end of the font name, and cover only the WGL characters. Courier New has no Ogham characters.

Courier New is used as the default font for monospace/modern generic font family in MS Windows (since Windows 3.1). It is commonly used as the font for plain text email messages.

Courier Final Draft

Courier Final Draft is a version of the typeface with a slightly altered pitch (spacing of characters) and slightly heavier stroke than Courier New, in order to approximate the output of an ink typewriter. Courier Final Draft is supplied with screenwriting software for use in writing screenplays, as it provides 55 lines per page which coincides with the rule that a screenplay page is approximately one minute of screen time. Further details are available in an article on the different versions of Courier, available here: [1].

Code page variants

Courier New Baltic, Courier New CE, Courier New Cyr, Courier New Greek, Courier New Tur are aliases created in the FontSubstitutes section of WIN.INI by Windows. These entries all point to the master font. When an alias YEW font is specified, the font's character map contains a different character set from the master font and the other alias fonts.

Courier Standard

Courier Standard, Courier Standard Bold, Courier Standard Bold Italic, Courier Standard Italic are fonts distributed with Adobe Reader 6, as a replacement for the PostScript Courier fonts. The stroke terminators are flat instead of round. It contains code pages 1252, Windows OEM Character Set. The font is Hinted and Smoothed for all point sizes. It contains OpenType layout tables aalt, dlig, frac, ordn, sups for Default Language in Latin script; dlig for TUR language in Latin script. Each font contains 374 glyphs.

Free alternatives

There are some free metric-compatible fonts used as Courier alternatives or for Courier font substitution:

• URW++ produced a version of Courier called Nimbus Mono L in 1984, and eventually released under the GPL and AFPL (as Type 1 font for Ghostscript) in 1996.^[4][5][6] It is one of the Ghostscript fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts (which include Courier). It is available in major free and open source operating systems.
• Liberation Mono is metrically equivalent font to Courier New developed by Ascender Corp. and published by Red Hat in 2007 under the GPL license with some exceptions.^[7] It is used in some GNU/Linux distributions as default font replacement for Courier New.^[8]
• FreeMono, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Mono L, which in turn descends from Courier.^[9][10] It is one of free fonts developed in GNU FreeFont project, first published in 2002. It is used in some free software as Courier replacement or for Courier font substitution.

Applications

In Latin 1 text

Courier is commonly used in ASCII art because it is a monospaced font and is available almost universally. "Solid-style" ASCII art uses the darkness/lightness of each character to portray an object, which can be quantified in pixels (here in pt. 12):

a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z
21	25	18	25	24	19	28	24	14	15	25	16	30	21	20	27	27	18	21	17	19	17	25	20	21	21

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
25	29	21	26	29	25	27	31	18	19	28	20	36	24	20	25	28	30	28	24	27	22	30	26	23	24

`	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	0	-	=	~	!	@	#	$	%	^	&	*	(	)	_	+
2	16	19	20	23	23	23	16	26	23	24	6	12	9	9	36	30	26	20	7	24	21	13	13	9	13

Œ

0152

[	]	\	;	'	,	.	/	{	}	|	:	"	<	>	?
17	17	8	11	4	7	4	8	16	16	13	8	8	9	9	13

See also

• Core fonts for the Web
• Monospaced font
• Proportional font
• Sentence spacing

References

1. ^ US bans time-honoured typeface
2. ^ ^{a b} Goodbye to the Courier font? - Tom Vanderbilt, Slate.com, 20 February 2004.
3. ^ Paul Shaw (2004-03-10). "State Department bans Courier New 12, except for treaties". http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/state-department-bans-courier-new-12-except-for-treaties. Retrieved 2010-04-15. 
4. ^ Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts., archived from the original on 2002-10-23, http://web.archive.org/web/20021023155414/http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/378/1996/5/0/2064811/, retrieved 2010-05-06 
5. ^ (TXT) Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts., http://www.tug.org/fonts/deutsch-urw.txt, retrieved 2010-05-06 
6. ^ "Fonts and TeX". 2009-12-19. http://www.tug.org/fonts/. Retrieved 2010-05-06. 
7. ^ License.txt - LICENSE AGREEMENT AND LIMITED PRODUCT WARRANTY, LIBERATION FONT SOFTWARE, https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/browser/master/License.txt, retrieved 2010-01-15 
8. ^ Mandriva Linux 2008 Release Tour, http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/What%27s_New#Liberation_font_set, retrieved 2010-04-04, "integrated into Mandriva Linux 2008" 
9. ^ "GNU FreeFont - Why do we need free outline UCS fonts?". 2009-10-04. http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/articles/Why_Free_Fonts.html. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
10. ^ "GNU FreeFont - Design notes". 2009-10-04. http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/design-notes.html. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 

• Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.

External links

• Courier New font information (Microsoft typography)
• Downloadable version of Courier New (Core fonts for the Web)
• Designer of Courier: the Bud Kettler Page
• Courier designer dies, aged 80
• Typeart history: Courier
• Digital Media Typography, layout and concept covers history of courier and Kettler