I’m working on the manuscript for my novel this weekend and I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but I wanted to give this thread time to hang out for a while, die, get bumped, hang out some more … you know, the way my threads usually go.
Anyway, I’m got the thing printed up in Lucida Console now, but I’m not 100% pleased with it. I would prefer a serif font and one that’s a little lighter in weight than that. Courier New is, IMHO, much too light weight, though. I also don’t care much for it’s proportions. The letters look too squatty to me.
So, I open up the floor for nominations. All nominations which lie outside the standard Windows98/Office97 installed fonts should include a link or something so I can go get it, natch.
Of the freebies, I generally use plain old Courier, but I also think it’s too light so I use Courier Bold.
My favorite monospace font for printing is Letter Gothic (Bold again), but then, it looks crappy on screen, it looks great in print. But it’s a severe sanserif font, you might not like it.
You might like Prestige Elite (Adobe) since it is very similar to Courier but has a bit more personality.
I’m sure there are clones of these fonts from freebie places.
I like Letter Gothic a lot, as well as Lucida Sans Typewriter and Arial Monospaced for SAP, but there are very few freely available fixed-width fonts out there (bugger me, I’ve tried to find them).
If you’re talking about fonts like Helvetica and Courier, then you’re looking for a sans serif font. Serif fonts are like Times, Bodoni and Baskerville, or, as I heard in a meeting once: “They’re the ones with the little feet on 'em.”
The question that comes to mind is: why do you want a new font? To help you proof your pages? Since you’re looking for a sans serif font, then I’d go for Arial.
If you’re thinking ahead to when you’re submitting the manuscript, editors are rather conservative and would prefer what they’re used to, which would be courier. I’ve heard time and again, especially since word processors came into general use, that they hate tarted-up manuscripts. It looks like you’re trying to distract them from a subpar manuscript.
If you’re writing a resume, you want to use two or three fonts, you want a nice, pale color, you want something to seperate you from the pack.
Editors don’t give a crap about all that. They have 500,000 slushes to wade through an hour. They want readability. They want to be dazzled by your bedazzling writing, not the curves of your letters. Courier works best because that’s what they’re used to.
BTW, If you haven’t seen this site, or one like it, it’s a great way to help ensure you’re formatting correctly before sending your story off.
Courier is not a sans serif font. Helvetica is, but Courier has serifs, specifically slab serifs.
My vote would have been for Lucida Typewriter also. However, I agree with what Enderw24 and pesch have said about editors. I’d stick with Courier. Courier Medium is nice, if you can get your hands on it. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a freeware version or a decent equivalent.
(In case anyone’s wondering what Prestige Elite, Letter Gothic, Lucida Typewriter, and Courier look like: http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/C/C_4d.html)
Thanks to everybody for the replies. It does help to have the additional “think-about-it” type input, too.
I have not made a final decision on what font I want to use. The biggest grudge I have against Courier is really it’s weight, so maybe I will look into “Courier Medium.” Sadly, I can’t just bold it because I need the bold to distinguish certain elements of the text. No, I’m not trying to gussy it up. Parts of the story take place online (e-mail and chat), so it’s significant to the story that in some places they have to do this to emphasize points and in some places they can do this.
I’ll look through the suggestions you’ve all made and I leave the floor open for further nominations.
Just for the sake of closure, I wanted to post that I went with Courier New, 12 point, and that I bit the bullet and converted every single bold and italic markup to underline even though if it winds up getting published, a lot of it will have to be put back in the typesetting.
You’re best choice for a manuscript is 12-point Courier. I also have used 10-point Prestige (which I prefer), but nowadays few editors have seen an elite typewriter, so it’s going to look odd to them. And odd-looking is bad in a manuscript.
KneadToKnow, don’t ask me to explain it, but the publishers almost seem to prefer typing the damn thing over again. If they accept your story/manuscript, you can certainly offer to give it to them on disk, though.
For the sake of their eyesight, they like underlining better than italics when reading it.
One author, I don’t know who, said that you can certainly try to submit your story written in crayon on toilet paper, but unless you’re Harlan Ellison, you don’t stand a chance in hell of getting it read.
I’ve always been a sucker for Letter Gothic, since it looks so Fifties, but I can see the points about giving the editor what she wants to see. Serifs do help move your eyes, too.
LG and Courier are also great levelers. You aren’t showing off how fancy your system is; you’re showing off your own abilities. The only way a reader can tell you didn’t type it on a typewriter is the lack of Wite-Out. There’s no way she can tell (at a glance) if you bought the latest Pentium V and a thousand-dollar laser printer or typed it up on a 20-year-old Apple and printed it on a garbage-picked Epson dot matrix.
They don’t usually type it over again. Nowadays, they’ll ask for a disk. But a monospaced font is essential when the need to accurately judge how long the piece will run.
Courier has always been my go-to font for fixed width, but I have another little dandy in my collection called Hell’s Programmer. It was made for writing computer code. Zeros and capital Os are strikingly different, as are 1s and lowercase Ls. It’s also much more narrow than Courier, so you can see the full length of a line of code in less screen real estate. Basically, it was made to good on a computer screen. Very handy.
HA! Speaking of my link, I just reread it. Turns out that quote I attributed to the “unknown author” was actually William Shunn, the guy I linked to! Talk about [sub]coincidence? Irony?[/sub] stupidity…
I like Lucida Console, but it sometimes can be hard to discern the capitals from the uncapitalized letters. It’s a sans serif font and it looks more modern than Courier or Helvetica, IMHO.
So, am I the only one who uses Times New Roman almost exclusively? I just like how it looks. Of course, bookman old fashion and courier are favored by college students everywhere since they take up more line space at 12pt…
