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From: spworley@athena.mit.edu (Spaceman Spiff)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Why is Courier ugly?
Message-ID: <1991Mar18.033236.20461@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 91 03:32:36 GMT
References: <1991Mar15.225317.13890@ico.isc.com> <93404@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Sender: spworley@athena.mit.edu
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 21


The serifs on Courier are also non-tapered; they maintain the same width as
the body of each character. I agree that they look "tacked-on."

Because the lines in each character in Courier are so thin, I find that
medium to low resolution representations (300 dpi and lower) are especially
unaesthetic. Compare a very high resolution Courier to a screen font version
to see what I mean.

About the only big use I've seen for Courier is for "computer output" or "user
input" in computer manuals and documentation. I immediately associate it with
output from programs, and this is a very useful when a manual is trying to 
distinguish output from comments in the manual text. You can see this
in the \TeX manual, the GNU Emacs manual, and many, many other types
of computer documentation. 

-Steve

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Steve Worley                                           spworley@athena.mit.edu
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