IBM Courier

This is IBM’s digital form of Courier, in TTF and other modern formats, with coding-friendly variants.

IBM created a digitized version of Courier and gave the fonts in PostScript Type 1 format to the X Consortium for distribution under the permissive IBM/MIT X Consortium Courier Typefont Agreement. This package retains that copyright and distribution terms.

The slashed-zero and dotted-zero variants also contain the following coding-friendly features:

• An altered lowercase “L”.
• A heightened tilde (“~”) for better visibility.
• Removed the fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and fff ligatures.

What’s Included

Weights included are the typical four:

• Regular
• Italic
• Bold
• Bold Italic

There are 12 fonts (individual weights and variants) in total.

Formats are:

• TTF
• OTF
• SVG
• WOFF
• WOFF2

These fonts do not contain additional hinting. Windows will render them differently from Courier New.

Courier New also has significantly more comprehensive Unicode coverage.

Why?

I created this package because I wanted one that’s as faithful (presumably) to IBM’s original Courier as possible.

Versus Other Couriers

Let’s compare IBM Courier with four other ones:

• IBM Courier, this Courier.

  

• Courier New, supplied with Windows, a thinner and also flat-terminated Courier.

  

• Courier Prime is a thicker, flat/rounded variant. The authors also provide sans-serif variants, and it has an actual italic!

  

• Bitstream Courier 10 Pitch, a thicker, rounded variant, was also provided to the X Consortium.

  

• Courier Code is Bitstream’s variant with a few modifications for coding.

  

About

The fonts, as distributed with X11, already contained “hidden” slashed-zero and dotted-zero characters. I created and added the altered lowercase “L” and hightened tilde, made the slashed and dotted zeroes the default in the coding variants, and removed the ligatures.

The “Courier” name and typeface design are in the public domain, though individual fonts (software implementations of that design) are available under varying licenses.

The Future

I may add additional characters sporadically.

More Information, Just Because

https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20160517191001/http://www.rolandstroud.com/downloads/essays/courierfonts.pdf