Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!nytim!marob!slhisc!jlister From: jlister@slhisc.uucp (John Lister) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Why is Courier ugly? Message-ID: <1991Mar26.184045.10113@slhisc.uucp> Date: 26 Mar 91 18:40:45 GMT References: <1991Mar15.225317.13890@ico.isc.com> <27E6EA46.1044@telly.on.ca> Organization: Shearson Lehman Brothers, Inc. Lines: 59 In article gasior@khazad-dum.rutgers.edu (Eric Gasior) writes: >evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: > >>In article <1991Mar15.225317.13890@ico.isc.com> rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes: > > [...comments on aesthetics of Courier & other daisy wheel print wheels deleted...] > > >>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. > >Ubiquitous? I've never seen a courrier wheel for my printer, and the >Selectrics I've seen generally don't have it either. Not all monospaced >fonts look alike, or as bad as courrier. I wonder why HP chose it. Courrier has >strange serifs. It's the only monospaced font that I know where the bases of >the 'i' and 'l' run for most of the character's allotted space. (BTW The Laser >Writer's courrier is different from HP's.) > >EDG Courier comes in various flavours (sorry, I'm English). The IBM Selectrics most definitely had a version of it, and it wasn't bad. There were some subtle variations in the stroke widths, which made it bearable. (At this stage of my life ~15 years ago, I was using a Selectric to type our college magazine, so I know just about all the font golfballs that IBM UK sold at the time for a fixed pitch selectric). HP's Courier, is not unlike IBM's, given the vagarities of rendering for a raster-based device. Adobe-based machines' Courier is one of the worst renditions of Courier that I have ever seen. It gives even an ugly font a bad name :-). It's far too light. I told myself that I would take the font apart one day and fix this as I have the font PFB file, and I think it should just be a matter of changing the stroke weight, but I haven't found the time to do this yet. Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good fixed pitch font. My complaints about Adobe's Courier apply to all their fixed pitch fonts. I bought their Letter Gothic, which is also too light, and their Prestige Elite looks about the same --at least in "Font & Function". Bitstream has the best fixed pitch fonts I have so far found, and their Fontware program produces good bitmaps. However, I don't think they really have perfected their technology so that their fonts & hints work well with Adobe rasterizers. I'm nitpicking, but some of their fonts look strange, even the new "Speedo" fonts, which come with a Type-1 PFB file. I hope they manage to overcome this, since I am impressed with their Letter Gothic and with their Monospaced Swiss, both of which are *Much* better than Adobe's. John Lister.