Typeface: Courier New

I'm including this font for the sake of completion, despite its lack of relevance in today's computing world. It was one of the three fonts included by Microsoft in Windows 3.1 in 1992, alongside Times New Roman and Arial. Unlike the other two fonts, it was never intended to be used in printed documents. In 1992 all laser printers had Courier installed, and Courier 12 point was their default font. Courier New was intended to be a representation on screen of what the laser printer would print.

Courier was created as a typeface (more accurately as a font) for IBM typewriters in 1955. Neither the name nor the design was copyrighted, so clones have been released up to the present day, sometimes identical, sometimes with very minor differences.

Courier New is the name of the typeface digitised by Monotype Inc for Microsoft. To guarantee accuracy, it was digitised directly from the golf ball of the IBM Selectric typewriter. This was short-sighted, because it didn't allow for the spread of the ink from the ribbon on impact. As a result, if Courier New is printed it looks very thin on paper. But as I said, it was never intended to be printed. Superior digital versions of Courier, such as the version made by Bitstream Inc, were designed by hand and are closer to the appearance of pages typed with the IBM Selectric.

In my last post I divided fonts into serif fonts and sans serif fonts. Here we have another major category. In Courier all the characters have the same width, easily visible in the character table, making it a monospace typeface, in contrast to Times New Roman and Arial, which are proportional typefaces. Monospace fonts are usually serif fonts.

Despite being a serif font, the italic version of Courier New merely tilts the letters with only minor redesign. The small letters A and F have the same basic form as the regular font.

As you can see in Courier New's capital E, the horizontal strokes and serifs remain unchanged, while the vertical strokes and serifs are tilted.

The small J shows how curves are adapted that link horizontal and vertical strokes. This is the closest that Courier New Italic gets to a redesign.

By the way, doesn't the tilted dot over the small J look amazing? If I remember my school lessons correctly, the shape is called a rhomboid. That's a word I've never used since school and will probably never use again. Most people say that monospace fonts are ugly, but if you look closely you can find little specks of beauty.

The bold version of Courier New is a standard thickening of all strokes, both the letters and the serifs. I can't see any evidence of redesign. Can you?

The bold italic version of Courier New is a standard thickening of all the strokes in the italic version. Once again, I can't spot any redesign.

Courier might seem like an outdated typeface, but it still exists in two areas. The first is software development. For computer programs, both on computer screens and on paper, formatting is essential to legibility.

The other area, surprisingly,  is the film industry. Screenplays are required to be written in 12 point Courier. This makes it possible for lazy film executives to judge the length of a screenplay without reading it. Due to Courier New looking too thin on paper, the Bitstream version of Courier was used. More recently, a typeface called Courier Screenplay has been developed, which is identical to Bitstream's Courier apart from the line spacing. I'll just print two lines for comparison.

Courier New is above, Courier Screenplay is below. That should make the difference obvious.