Why I Hate Courier/Courier-New

Date: June 30, 2007
      It is interesting that my one profession (computer architecture, hardware design, software, firmware, and other aspects of these), overlaps with my future profession (writer of anything I wish).
      I have, in fact, overlapped these two before, having published 40 technical papers and articles, three hard-cover textbooks, a couple of eBooks (HTML), and one Science Fiction novel, in addition to the 100s of datasheets, user manuals, training presentations, reference guide, ads, press releases, brochures, and the occasional article in the press or a magazine.
      It goes without saying, having run technical publications at every conceivable level in multiple companies, that I am intimately acquainted with the publishing operation.
      In fact, at one company, my department printed and shipped classroom lectures and teacher's manuals all over the world. I was, for a few moments, even investigating getting a typesetter for my department (we had our own huge collating copier) since I was sick of the two fonts to which we had ready access. The Daisywheel impact printer gave you two fonts on a wheel and you could switch back and forth.
      Impact and Courier.
      Impact on a laserprinter is, in fact, nicer than it was on an impact printer. It was also the same uni-spacing that courier still provides.
      Courier was the font that we all have seen since the 1940s. It is the font you got on an impact line printer. This was the printer attached to early mainframe computers. They are, in fact, still around, and still use Courier.
      If you live in UNIX-land, (this includes Linux and SUN systems, and the terminal window of the Mac or PC), you still see Courier.
      Why change?
      Spacing is easy.
      Reports do not take a lot of thought.
      It is ugly and we all hate it but admit, it has its uses.
      Typesetting itself (remember the typesetter?) vanished from my mind when the laser printer arrived and fonts were something you could more easily use.
      We chose Helvetica (Arial on a PC) and Times (Times New Roman). Helvetica and Arial are for table titles, column labels, illustration titles and illustration labels. Times and Helvetica and their relations are used for text.
      We experimented with many, many others (there are thousands and 2-3 main suppliers, zillions of off-the-wall fonts). We quickly learned that the non-standard fonts could not print and caused problems for people without them. We standardized. That standard set is pretty damn big.
      We developed page-layout programs, FrameMaker, PageMaker, Ventura Publisher. We still have FrameMaker (creaking at the seams but --- here comes FrameMaker 8!), InDesign (a memory hog - CS3), QuarkXpress (forget where that is) and OpenOffice (2.2). We have kerning (when we remember to use it), proportional spacing (built in) and strive for actual readability
      We had word-processing programs, WORDSTAR, WORDPAL, WORDPERFECT and finally WORD. We still have WordPerfect and Word. They are not the note-taking, meeting-minutes programs of the past.
      What did the publishing industry do?
      They went to typesetting - and stayed there.
      They developed a method - and refuse to change it.
      They live about 10 years behind the rest of us, who publish in Courier only when there is a gun to our heads or we are actually publishing, choke, gasp!, CODE.
      Having been on computers since about 1963, I know Courier. I hate courier, unless I am actually reading or writing code. And sometimes, even when doing that, I eschew Courier unless specific spacing is syntactically important. (Syntax is positional requirements in a code language syntax - something they have run away from over the years.)
      So when I am told that I HAVE to print out a file for a story in COURIER, that I have to use Courier to submit to a contest, I frankly would rather slit my wrists. It is ugly. It takes up too much space. It's too much like reading code.
      There is, at this stage of the game, given the software we now have, the computer power, the page-layout programs, the sophistication I would have died to have back in my heavy publication days, absolutely no excuse for the editors and publishing houses to be clinging for dear life to the technology they learned once but can't manage to update. Dinosaurs.
      Small wonder a number of us are running to Lulu.com (self-publish eBooks and POD), or starting our own publishing operations. PDF. POD. eBooks. Fonts. Color.
      Don't get me started on cover illustrations. I think they are still painting them. Photoshop hasn't quite registered. Can't tell you how long that has been around!