The ubiquitous Courier is an example of a monospaced font: one whose characters are all the same width. Usually, fonts are proportionally spaced, meaning that the characters vary in width.
The font samples below are set at the same point size. But the monospaced font takes up more horizontal space than the proportional font. This is most noticeable in characters that are narrow in proportional fonts, like f, i, j, l, r, t, commas, and periods).
Jill, did you buy the milk?
Jill, did you buy the milk?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.,!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.,!
Monospaced fonts were invented to suit the mechanical limitations of the typewriter. They were not invented because anyone liked them. Monospaced fonts are hard to read and they waste space.
Here in the 21st century, there’s no reason to use a monospaced font in a legal document. Most courts still allow pleadings and other filings to be set in Courier. Don’t. If you are not sitting in front of a typewriter, do not use a monospaced typeface.
“But I practice in a court that absolutely requires a monospaced font…”
In some places, Courier or mono-spaces are required. A lawyer friend was explaining it to me and how much he hated it, but that he was required to use it.
I disagree - I like using courier (”Dark Courier”) and mono-spaced fonts they look clean, and are very easy to read - they do take up space, but avoid “fussiness” All the fonts used for newspapers were designed to fit more words in less space - and do just that, and look cramped. I like the fonts you indicate as being good fonts, and have chosen ones similar for my own documents, but now have swung back to dark courier
You may want to consider using images for your font examples; this is the second page on which the example has been completely ruined for me, by the simple fact that I pre-set my fonts in my browser. So both examples of each line on the page are identical to me, as it happens. Why? Because I often read books from the Gutenberg site, which would mean I either have to read them in a monospace font, wearing out my retinas, or I can change it to something more legible.
Just a thought.
Effective writers calibrate their writing—structure, style, tone, presentation—to their audience. If you’re a lawyer, using Courier because you “like using” it is not sufficient justification. Your work is intended to be read by others, and using an annoying, ugly font is a quick way to turn them off to whatever you’re saying.
It’s interesting that you (and many other typographers) say that monospaced fonts are more difficult to read, when professional authors are still advising young writers to submit manuscripts in a fixed-width font, precisely for legibility. Google “proper manuscript format”, and you’ll find near unanimous agreement in the publishing world that a double-spaced, monospace-font text reads most easily, and ease of reading is considered crucial when trying to get an editor to buy your work.
I agree that there are specific format requirements for manuscripts. But this is typography for lawyers, not typography for aspiring authors. In law, monospaced fonts are endangered and trending toward extinct.
Legibility is not an absolute measure; people read best what they read the most. In the legal field, most lawyers and judges only see monospaced fonts occasionally, so a document set in a monospaced font will be comparatively more difficult to read. But in publishing, editors read monospaced fonts all the time, so a document set in a monospaced font is easy for them to read.
Also, the reasons that publishers demand manuscripts using monospaced fonts have less to do with pure legibility and more to do with practical workflow considerations. If monospaced fonts were easiest to read in absolute terms, editors would publish their books in Courier. But they don’t.
Mass. R. App. P. 20(a) requires that appellate briefs be typed in a monospaced font “such as…Courier.” http://www.lawlib.state.ma.us/mrap20.html#20a
Documents with tables having numbers in them will look better with monospaced fonts which allow the columns of numbers to line up nicely. Perhaps best would be to use a font (do they exist?) with monospaced (for the tables) and non-monospaced (for the text body) varieties.
It’s your lucky day—most text fonts already have monospaced numerals (called “tabular figures” in the trade) for exactly this reason.
New Jersey still requires Courier. Although the court rule is written in terms of picas rather than specific fonts, the clerk’s office has been known to reject briefs done in anything that isn’t Courier. The NJ court rule prompted my research into the science of font readability and its affect on legal writing. There is a running challenge to those graduating law students who are going to clerk for the NJ upper courts: “bring me the broom of Rule 2:6-10.”
-RAR
“Monospaced fonts are hard to read and they waste space.”
As a non-lawyer, I have to disagree. There is a whole industry who spend all day working on documents in monospace: software developers.
If you are writing computer code (or perhaps including code in another document - think, for instance, of the DeCSS case where the full source code of the DeCSS software was included in the defendant’s filings - rather ironically committing the exact same act of publication and showing that the code counted as speech under the First Amendment), it would be inappropriate to set it in anything other than a monospace typeface.
As monospace typefaces go, there are far nicer ones available than Courier/Courier New. Lucida Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Menlo Park (in OS X 10.6), Consolas (included in the latest Office and in Vista) and Inconsolata.
Personally I use Inconsolata-dz, which is Inconsolata but with the apostrophe symbol set straight.
There are some environments where computer code is set in a variable width typeface: AppleScript and UserTalk come to mind.
Elsewhere I note that monospaced fonts are preferred for software code. But lawyers aren’t writing software. So they should avoid monospaced fonts, for the reason given above—they are hard to read and waste space. That’s why you won’t find a book, newspaper or magazine set in a monospaced font (including books for software developers).
MB: It is unclear why you have assumed that (1) “people read best what they read most” and (2) publishers make decisions on which fonts to use based solely on the legibility of the font.
Whether a font is pleasing to the eye and easy to read likely depends on a variety of factors, perhaps including the reader’s familiarity with the font. The same is true with publisher’s decisions on which font to use in a printed work.
Long live courier new!
Legibility is relative. The only people who argue that monospaced fonts have generally superior legibility are those who use them all the time.
But if this were true, we’d expect to see more books, newspapers and magazines set in monospaced fonts. I’ve never seen one. (Even the new James Ellroy novel, which has “typewritten” sections, uses the font American Typewriter, which is visually typewriter-style but still proportionally spaced.)
My view is that these kinds of documents are the best models for legal typography. The fact that monospaced fonts are vastly preferred for e.g. software code only matters if you think software code is the best model for legal typography.
Like Caitiecat, my browser (Firefox 3 on Ubuntu Linux) doesn’t render your monospace examples properly. Changing the font-family to “Courier” from “Courier New” fixes the problem for me, but I can’t guarantee it won’t break the examples in other browsers.
Tom Morris: Us programmers use monospace fonts only for the fact that we need things to line up properly, and the easiest way to guarantee that is to have all characters the same width. We don’t do it for the beauty of it. Our case of “readability” is a very special one; after all, you don’t end every line of a legal document with a semicolon.
Also, the fonts you’ve mentioned are specially optimized for screen usage (especially Consolas and Inconsolata), so I don’t think they should be recommended for the printed word.
When you are dealing with transcripts there are some practical reasons that you must user monospaced fonts.
1. Courts mandate margins by the number of letters. Most reporters must use a right margin of around 54 and 9 pitch print.
2. Court reporters are paid by the page.
If you want to change the billing to be by the letter instead of the page then it could be changed but right now when it comes to transcripts your are stuck.
Court reporters bill by the page for the same reason that courts set document length limits by pages: in the age of the typewriter, that was the only easy way to measure.
But in the era of word processors with word-count functions, it would be equally easy for court reporters to bill by the word or character (and put their transcripts in a more legible font).
Or, they needn’t even go that far. I recently got a condensed transcript that was set in Verdana rather than Courier — it had the same line breaks and page breaks as the Courier version, but it was still easier to read. So, Courier could be used as a measuring device for invoicing purposes, but the copy intended for reading by humans could be set in something better.