Courier Prime
Monday, January 28, 2013 at 5:02PM 
John August has just released Courier Prime, a free typeface designed specifically for screenplays. John calls it “Courier, but better.” I think it’s beautiful.
Screenwriting began in the era of typewriters, and it’s always been served raw. What the screenwriter pulls out of the typewriter isn’t a manuscript to be sent to the publisher — it’s the final product.
Over the years, the tools have changed, with the advent of computers and printers and PDFs. But we still expect scripts to look like they came out of a typewriter.
It was for a typewriter, not a high-fidelity screen or printer, that Courier was designed, as John goes on to explain. I’ve always had a love/hate thing for Courier, and John’s history lesson helps explain why. Give it a read, and give Courier Prime a try.
Stu
The designer, Alan Dague-Greene, is a gentleman and a scholar.
Reader Comments (5)
Hi Stu,
seems the link to the Courier Prime leads to a classical message " Service Temporar unavailable due to a server internal error" ... Do you think is really temporary or they are moving that link?
Thanks a lot for sharing youre knowledge and youre love for cinematography w us !
Cheers
Lovely. Thanks for that little tidbit.
Hi Stu,
I love the Courier Prime font, but just a heads up: when I switched a 15-and-a-half-page animation episode script in Final Draft from Courier Final Draft to Courier Prime, the page count suddenly ballooned to nearly 16-and-a-half-pages. For broadcast timing reasons, our scripts have a hard 15.5 page count, so this sudden artificial change in length is a problem. Obviously your mileage may vary, but it's something to check carefully when using this font...
@Steve Marjaury
There seems to be an explanation for your problem on the font's page. http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/
The font is designed for screenwriting so it is the exact same size, but it seems final draft does something funny with line breaks (on windows only even?) which is out of the font designer's hands, so the page breaks move when you convert.
Though I surmise you would end up with the same length document if you typed it out in prime in the first place. That will make sharing editable final draft documents a bit problematic. I haven't tried it yet but I use movie magic, (and its terrible UI) so who knows what I'll get.
Thanks very much for pointing this out Russell! I think that really might be the problem: I'm on a Mac, but one of the script editors is on a PC, using Final Draft for Windows. Clearly the switch from one "engine' to the other is messing up the formatting. I'll do some tests on an original document started in FD with Courier Prime and see if it changes the spacing when I switch fonts...