Comparing Dancing Couriers

As I mentioned yesterday, I quite like the new Courier Prime typeface. It’s often difficult to put into words what separates one Courier from another, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying in the past.

This time around I figured I’d make an animated GIF cycling through the top contenders. Here it is:

Check out the full size version here.

Personally I think I’ll be sticking with Pitch for writing on my Mac. That said, if Courier Prime were available a few months back I don’t know that I would have sprung for Pitch, which set me back a not insignificant $75 for a roman and italic pair.

I do think that Courier Prime should become the de facto font for printed screenplays, no matter what you use to write with on screen. Not just because it’s good, but because it makes vanilla Courier look bad next to it.

Really excellent work by Alan Dague-Greene. And a big kudos (and thank you) to John August and the Quote-Unquote Apps team. They’re making screenwriting better for everyone one release at a time.

Methodology

Fonts compared:

• Courier Regular & Oblique
• Courier Screenplay Book & Italic
• Courier Prime Regular & Italic
• Pitch Medium & Medium Italic

Courier Final Draft was left out because a) the last time I did a Courier comparison it didn’t distinguish itself enough to stick around and b) I forgot about it. I didn’t include Courier New because it sucks. The only reason I didn’t compare the bold weights is that I don’t own a copy of Pitch Bold¹ and I wanted to keep things consistent.

Copy comes from Hipster Ipsum. (I know iPhone is mis-capitalized. Blame a hipster.)

Each image is a screenshot from Ulysses laid over one another in Photoshop. Type is set at 16 pt, lines spaced at 1.2 (120% in Ulysses’ parlance). The full size image is cropped at 100%. I tried building the text in Photoshop but the results were never as consistent as in an actual text editor. I had been using Ulysses to flip through typefaces on my own and wanted to recreate that effect.

Here’s a closer look at each frame: