[playpause]

When I look at the individual glyphs, or even whole passages, I don’t like it. It looks wispy and particular. But there’s something really nice about the way it comes together on a printed page in a well set academic paper. It just looks right. Which could be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome I guess. I feel similarly about Courier and screenplays.

[red_trumpet]

I always wondered: Why are screenplays written in a monospaced font? To me that just looks like an odd relic from typewriter times. Is there any better explanation?

[munificent]

> To me that just looks like an odd relic from typewriter times.

This is the initial reason. It persists because it is part of the shorthand filmmakers use to estimate time from text. A page of screenplay translates to about a minute of screen time. That conversion is deeply ingrained in Hollywood. Everyone will look at the page count of a screenplay and make assumptions about the running time of the resulting film.

If you change the font metrics, that conversion breaks and it would confuse the hell out of everyone. And if different screenplays (or different drafts of the same one) use different metrics then you lose the ability to compare their length just using page counts.

It's important to remember that screenplays are real physical working artifacts. In the production of a film, people will be carrying around dog-eared copies of it. The director will say things like, "We're going to try to get through three pages today." Pages are a real concept, not just an arbitrary subdivision of a continuous string of text.

Also the font is part of film culture at this point. Using a different font would convey that you are an outsider or don't care about the norms and history of cinema. It's exactly how when you see a page set in Computer Modern you think, "Ah, this is a real CS paper." A screenplay not set in Courier would look like a fraud.

If it makes you feel better, John August has a slightly more modern font that preserves the exact metrics of 12 point Courier:

https://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

[tobr]

At least for screenplays there’s Courier Prime [1]. Perhaps a Computer Modern Prime would be popular.

1: https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/

[Sunspark]

Courier Prime is a good font, but one piece of advice.. if you use fonts aliased as I do, you need to use the original release of it.. the later version on the site which was done by someone other than the original designer (as far as I can tell) stripped out all the hinting so it looks bad if you have anti-aliasing turned off. For this reason, I keep the original around.

[TuringTest]

Is it this one? [1] It doesn't have a free license like the later version, though.

[1] https://en.m.fontke.com/font/21564413/