Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2116 comp.lang.postscript:8010
Newsgroups: comp.fonts,comp.lang.postscript
Path: utzoo!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: Why is Courier ugly?
Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 04:51:17 GMT
Message-ID: <27E6EA46.1044@telly.on.ca>
References: <1991Mar15.225317.13890@ico.isc.com>

In article <1991Mar15.225317.13890@ico.isc.com> rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:

>It is well known (regardless of whether it's true) that Courier is one of
>the ugliest fonts in the history of Western Civilization (such as it is).
>In particular, it's regarded as ugly even within the limited context of
>being a fixed-pitch font, which is a tough constraint on font design.
>
>What I'd like to get is some consensus of _why_ it's considered so ugly.

First, as you suggest, the constrait of being designed for fixed-pitch
is a good cause of the ugliness in itself. Propotionally spaced type
just looks more ... natural. Look at the letter 'i' in Courier, it seems
as if the letter's serifs are stretched out of proportion to prevent
too mucg white space floating around the letter in fixed pitch.

I haven't seen any studies, but my instinct tells me that fixed pitch
Courier is harder on the eye than classic body types like Times or
Bookman.

Another problem is in the stroke weights. There's no variation, no thin
and thick lines, everything's the same. Boring. On a sans-serif type
like Avant Garde or Univers, you can get away with it, but only as a
display font -- would you ever want to read a book whose body type was set
in Avant Garde? Uniform stroke weights on serif fonts just don't seem to
work well. There are a few such fonts, such as Egyptian (I think), but
they only work for their novelty value, which means they need to be used
sparingly at best.

The biggest problem, though, is that it's so ubiquitous - It's the only
font you can produce on just about every typewriter, daisy wheel, LQ dot
matrix and laser printer ever built. It's too common. In client sites
where I've upgraded their printers with Postscript cartidges, the main
oohs and aahs come not from fancy graphics, shading, or scalable
fonts... it's the ability to do business letters in a proportional font
without the bother of downloaded fonts.


-- 
 Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
       evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
           Vanilla Ice is a few cubes short of a full tray...