Final Draft... "Tight"

ComicBent is very good at the format stuff.

And he is exactly right. I use Courier 10 BT (Corel) and on "very tight" I get a crisp font that does not look at all crowded on the page and prints nice and medium dark.

It's hard to find that perfect combo. It really does depend on the script and how balanced it looks in the first place on the pages.

Cole & Haag's book specifies a 10 pitch font (10 characters per inch) that's 12 pts high. I guess if the 10 in "Courier 10 BT" refers to the pitch rather than the point size, it could be okay. But computer fonts are generally designated in pt sizes rather than pitch, since most computer fonts these days are proportional fonts (i.e., different letters have different widths, so it's pointless to talk about characters per inch).

Scripts really should be written in a non-proportional font, so every inch always equals 10 characters. That's not just an arbitrary rule. There's a practical reason for it, just like there is for the way you set your margins: the 1 page=1 minute guideline. Some computer fonts are non-proportional (every letter gets equal width), but not all Courier fonts are non-proportional.

Being a great lover of desktop publishing, I have at least nine different Courier fonts. The best of the printing fonts is definitely Courier10 BT. It does not display as crisply on screen as Courier New, but you can always switch to Courier10 BT when you print. You do have to tinker with the line spacing to decrease it somewhat if you want to shoot for six lines per inch.

The '10' does not refer to point size. The name of the font is a bit misleading. It presumably refers to 'characters per inch'. Ten is the number of characters that you get per inch in a truly monospaced 12-point Courier (Courier of any flavor).

The 'Courier Old' that comes with MMS2K is also pretty good, though skinnier than than Courier10 BT. Courier Old is similar to Courier Final Draft.