Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

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

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

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.

So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)

> Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop.

Screenplays contain more than just lines.

> Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate.

Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that? People hand round paper screenplays, or bits of screenplays, all the time, especially on set. It's much more practical for lots of purposes. Abandoning the minute-per-page rule of thumb (or equally importantly pages-per-shooting-day targets) would create way more problems than it solves.

However, it's also true that if you receive a screenplay that's not in standard screenplay format, it's a very reliable indication that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. Not a perfect heuristic, but there are maybe hundreds of thousands of spec scripts in circulation of which a few dozen a year get picked up by studios. So they can afford to be picky.

Bonus trivia: As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're George Miller.

>I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time.

Agreed. Here's a fun counterexample:

2001: A Space Oddyssey

Screenplay length: 65 pages

Run length: 161 minutes

:)

In addition to using a very standard font, screenplays have a lot of other very strict formatting guidelines involving use of things like particular whitespace rhythms.

It's the combination of the whole, including and especially the whitespace rhythms (which are still connected to font metrics, of course), that lead to the 1 page is approximately 1 minute guideline metric, because scene descriptions and actions have different whitespace from dialog.

Interestingly, compared to your expectation that a Tarantino screenplay would be more dense than the Fury Road screenplay, it is actually dialog that has a lot more whitespace overall in the screenplay format (they are subject to smaller inner columns) than scene descriptions/action descriptions (which use the full width of the page). Word count wise, action involves a lot more prose than dialog and many of the best action screenplays have more overall word count than a more dialog-heavy screenplay. (What I've seen of the Fury Road screenplay read like a novel, though as is pointed out elsewhere it is fascinating because it was written storyboard first, which is the exception rather than the rule.)

The screenplay format really is a fascinating thing to study. There are some great books out there on the screenplay format and how it came to be what it is today.

This is actually a common problem with digitisations of metal fonts, not specific to Courier. Many (although not all; Adobe's been pretty good about avoiding this particular failing, for example) of them are too anemic for screen use at body text size, presumably (although I have no hard evidence) because of not taking account of ink bleed. Victims include Bembo (the first one, not Bembo Book, which partially fixes this), several Caslons, Sabon, Janson, (an extreme example) Simoncini Garamond, and even Computer Modern (where the problem wasn't so much a transition from metal to digital, since Computer Modern was designed digitally, but from METAFONT - which can be parameterized, allowing "blackness" to be adjusted for ink spread - to Type 1 - which isn't).

Speculating a bit, one of the problems that digitisers may have encountered is that ink bleed affects fonts differently at different sizes. At small point sizes, ink bleed is proportionally large relative to the stroke width; at large point sizes, ink bleed has negligible effect. This is actually exactly what you want for readability's sake: at small sizes, you want to avoid thin strokes, and ink bleed does exactly that. At large size, "thin" strokes aren't actually thin any more. But a perfectly scalable digital font does not capture this beneficial effect of ink spread.

probably. and I sure hope so, since they use it as an example.

but why in the world would you have that happen on a font demo site? use an image/svg. otherwise it's risking becoming a demonstration that it's unreliable/you don't know what you're doing. (not that browsers make this stuff easy... but still.)

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.

Mailservers are just as much in the public view as they have been historically to be honest.

If IMAP is viewed as nostalgia install postfix/dovecot on something and play around.

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.

I think I'd have more use for the opposite: a font that's 13% narrower, to stuff more words into a page limit. It's harder to make text more concise than more verbose!