Reasons for and against Courier?

["Geoff Hart" <Geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Teri Ward is <<...working on a project where the customer wants 
an old, 1000-page document updated. The document is so old it's 
formatted in Courier, and this is the font the Customer wants me to 
use on the _new_ document. She believes that Courier is 
eminently readable and the best choice of fonts. Help! >>

There's no question that at least for me, Courier isn't as readable 
as a highly legible serif, proportional typeface like Times or 
Garamond. But let's face it: Courier was a standard font for many 
years, and people read it with little or any difficulty. And if you have 
an audience that has acquired considerable familiarity and skill 
with Courier, it may even be (arguably) a good font choice.  

That being said, I think we're in agreement that there are many 
much more legible typefaces. The easiest way to make your case 
is to present a series of options: lay out samples of one page of 
the document in Courier, Times, and (say) a dozen other 
typefaces. You can even throw in a few that resemble Courier, but 
that have been updated to improve legibility; one that I recall is 
named "American Typewriter", and though it's visually similar, it 
reads much better. Not as well as Times, say, but if you absolutely 
can't persuade your client, it may be a decent compromise.

It's quite likely that by providing a range of alternatives and asking 
the client which they prefer, you'll make your point fairly 
convincingly without forcing the person to swallow their pride, admit 
they were wrong, and lose face to you. (In fact, if the person isn't 
really a typographer and you provide a range of alternatives that 
include similar but better fonts, they may not even be able to pick 
Courier out of the pack. I've seen that  happen before!)

One thing I wouldn't recommend doing: fudging the test by 
creating a really appalling use of Courier (bad tracking, bad 
leading, bad type size, bad justification). That may make your 
point for you, but apart from the ethics of the situation, if the 
client catches you doing this, you've lost your credibility and 
may have a hard time getting it back. Worse yet, what if the 
person decides they love that design, and insist that you 
standardize on it? <g>

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I 
suspect 
that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)