🚀 go-pugleaf

I's like to try to clear up some of the questions that have been floating
around regarding Courier. So:

* The Courier in most existing printers is a stroked font with rounded
endcaps. It was stroked because 8 years ago ROM was worth more than gold, and
a stroked font uses much less memory (half the path elements). The original
version also used one set of paths for all four fonts, for further memory
savings.

* When the need for a Type 1 version outweighed the (addictive) memory
savings, Sumner Stone gave us the go-ahead to use a more accurate design,
rather than the outline clone used by the clonemakers. This leads to all the
questions you've seen to date. Such questions are inevitable, but the
improvement seemed worth it.

* Newer printers and the ATM package include a revised version of Courier
(anything with version number 2.00x). As has been mentioned, there are
multiple designs of this face, but Adobe's newer version is fairly well in
line with the original IBM design. (Personally, I prefer Frutiger's redesign.)

* Although the character bounding boxes are necessarily different in the new
version, Adobe has an *adamant* policy of not altering character widths in
any revised fonts, so line breaks will not be affected.

I hope we can now move on to more important matters...

- David Lemon
  Type Nerd

Disclaimer: I wasn't here 8 years ago, and I've been known to have opinions.