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Thanks for explaining this. I was having trouble to understand what was the concrete problem this font was trying to solve. That makes a lot of sense. Especiall

Thanks for explaining this. I was having trouble to understand what was the concrete problem this font was trying to solve. That makes a lot of sense. Especially the standardization of text length to determine actual playtime.

feelix 8y ago
didn't the very first paragraph fta make things sufficiently clear? "Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time."
- munificent 8y ago
  It does, but it's easy to underestimate how important this is to the film industry.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Yeah. I read that part, but I didn't know about the idiosyncrasies behind the use of the font, so it wasn't fully clear to me why was important in this industry to heavily rely on a particular font. Also, read the HN guidelines. Comments like this degrade the quality of the discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- _underflow_ 8y ago
  As a non-seasoned complete outsider, I thought this part of the article was somehow being dryly facetious or sarcastic or something. Kinda good to have somebody to provide context, actually.
- asjo 8y ago
  So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)
  - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    I would think they were typed on manual typewriters (so the tradition of using Courier probably stems from those days).
mcv 8y ago
I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be important for screenplays too. Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate. So to me it seems that if the industry indeed insists on everything being in courier, that's more likely to be a traditionalist remnant from the typewriter era rather than a rational decision. But I admit I don't know this industry at all.
- jforberg 8y ago
  > Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Screenplays contain more than just lines.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Even so, using the number of words to describe events to estimate the time those events will take to play out, seems like asking for trouble.
    - scott_s 8y ago
      And yet. It's a rough heuristic, good enough for its purpose.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  > Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate. Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that? People hand round paper screenplays, or bits of screenplays, all the time, especially on set. It's much more practical for lots of purposes. Abandoning the minute-per-page rule of thumb (or equally importantly pages-per-shooting-day targets) would create way more problems than it solves. However, it's also true that if you receive a screenplay that's not in standard screenplay format, it's a very reliable indication that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. Not a perfect heuristic, but there are maybe hundreds of thousands of spec scripts in circulation of which a few dozen a year get picked up by studios. So they can afford to be picky. Bonus trivia: As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're George Miller.

feelix 8y ago

didn't the very first paragraph fta make things sufficiently clear? "Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time."

munificent 8y ago
It does, but it's easy to underestimate how important this is to the film industry.
whoisjuan 8y ago
Yeah. I read that part, but I didn't know about the idiosyncrasies behind the use of the font, so it wasn't fully clear to me why was important in this industry to heavily rely on a particular font. Also, read the HN guidelines. Comments like this degrade the quality of the discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
_underflow_ 8y ago
As a non-seasoned complete outsider, I thought this part of the article was somehow being dryly facetious or sarcastic or something. Kinda good to have somebody to provide context, actually.
asjo 8y ago
So there were no screenplays before 1956? (When the Courier typeface was created.)
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  I would think they were typed on manual typewriters (so the tradition of using Courier probably stems from those days).

mcv 8y ago

I don't see the relationship between text length and actual play time. Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Text/playtime varies a lot between a Tarantino movie and something like Mad Max: Fury Road. It seems like a pointless metric. And while I like courier in general, I thought typography experts disliked it because it's not as readable as proportional fonts. I'd expect readability to be important for screenplays too. Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate. So to me it seems that if the industry indeed insists on everything being in courier, that's more likely to be a traditionalist remnant from the typewriter era rather than a rational decision. But I admit I don't know this industry at all.

jforberg 8y ago
> Plays and movies aren't just people spewing lines non-stop. Screenplays contain more than just lines.
- mcv 8y ago
  Even so, using the number of words to describe events to estimate the time those events will take to play out, seems like asking for trouble.
  - scott_s 8y ago
    And yet. It's a rough heuristic, good enough for its purpose.
Joeboy 8y ago
> Besides, stuff like word count is easy to automate. Supposing I hand you a 90 page book and ask you roughly how many words are in it. How are you going to answer that? People hand round paper screenplays, or bits of screenplays, all the time, especially on set. It's much more practical for lots of purposes. Abandoning the minute-per-page rule of thumb (or equally importantly pages-per-shooting-day targets) would create way more problems than it solves. However, it's also true that if you receive a screenplay that's not in standard screenplay format, it's a very reliable indication that the writer doesn't know what they're doing. Not a perfect heuristic, but there are maybe hundreds of thousands of spec scripts in circulation of which a few dozen a year get picked up by studios. So they can afford to be picky. Bonus trivia: As it happens Fury Road is a very rare case of a movie that was originally developed as a storyboard, and converted to screenplay format for production purposes. Apparently you can do that if you're George Miller.