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Courier (typeface)
Encyclopedia
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 typewriter
s, 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 screenplay
s 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.
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."
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.
:
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):
Slab serif
In typography, a slab serif typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular , or rounded . Slab serif typefaces generally have no bracket...
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
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
was commissioned in the 1950s by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
for use in typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
s, but they did not secure legal exclusivity
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
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 screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
s to be written in 12 point
Point (typography)
In typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure, being a subdivision of the larger pica. It is commonly abbreviated as pt. The point has long been the usual unit for measuring font size and leading and other minute items on a printed page....
Courier or a close variant.
The font was later redrawn by Adrian Frutiger
Adrian Frutiger
Adrian Frutiger is one of the prominent typeface designers of the 20th century, who continues to influence the direction of digital typography in the 21st century; he is best known for creating the typefaces Univers and Frutiger.-Early life:Adrian Frutiger was born in Unterseen, Canton of Bern, as...
for the IBM Selectric Composer series of electric typewriters.
12 point
Point (typography)
In typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure, being a subdivision of the larger pica. It is commonly abbreviated as pt. The point has long been the usual unit for measuring font size and leading and other minute items on a printed page....
Courier New was also the U.S. State Department's standard typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
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.
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."
Courier New
Courier New is a version of Courier introduced with Windows 3.1, which also included rasterRasterisation
Rasterisation is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format and converting it into a raster image for output on a video display or printer, or for storage in a bitmap file format....
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
Ogham
Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the Old Irish language, and occasionally the Brythonic language. Ogham is sometimes called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet", based on a High Medieval Bríatharogam tradition ascribing names of trees to the individual letters.There are roughly...
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
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted 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: http://www.rolandstroud.com/downloads/essays/courierfonts.pdf.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 substitutionFont substitution
Font substitution is the process of using one font in place of another when the intended font either is not available or does not contain glyphs for the required characters.Font substitution can be aided by:...
:
- URW++ produced a version of Courier called Nimbus Mono LNimbus Mono LNimbus Mono is a monospaced typeface created by URW Studio in 1984, and eventually released under the GPL and AFPL in 1996 and LPPL in 2009. It features Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights, and is one of several freely licensed fonts offered by URW++...
in 1984, and eventually released under the GPLGNU General Public LicenseThe GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
and AFPLAladdin Free Public LicenseThe Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter.-History:The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points:...
(as Type 1 font for Ghostscript) in 1996. It is one of the GhostscriptGhostscriptGhostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format page description languages.- Features :...
fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts (which include Courier). It is available in major freeFree softwareFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and open source operating systems. - Liberation MonoLiberation fontsLiberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and 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. It is used in some GNU/Linux distributions as default font replacement for Courier New. - FreeMono, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Mono L, which in turn descends from Courier. 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.
In Latin 1 text
Courier is commonly used in ASCII artASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
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 |
| Π|
| 0152 |
| |
|
\ | ; | ' | , | . | / | { | } | | | : | " | < | > | ? |
| 17 | 17 | 8 | 11 | 4 | 7 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 13 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 13 |
See also
- Core fonts for the WebCore fonts for the WebCore fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
- Monospaced font
- Proportional font
- Sentence spacing
External links
- Courier New font information (Microsoft typography)
- Downloadable version of Courier New (Core fonts for the WebCore fonts for the WebCore fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
) - 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